
Tell Me Why is the multi-award winning episodic adventure game from Dontnod Entertainment in which twins use their supernatural bond to discover the truth of their troubled past.
Revenue comes from in-game items and microtransactions, which our price-based model doesn't estimate. The player count below is how many people own it, not what they spent.
Prices
The United States storefront in every case, so this compares stores and not countries.
About
Tell Me Why is the latest narrative adventure game from DONTNOD Entertainment, the studio behind the beloved franchise, Life is Strange. In this intimate mystery, reunited twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan use their supernatural bond to unravel the memories of their loving but troubled childhood. Set in beautiful small-town Alaska, Tell Me Why features true-to-life characters, mature themes and gripping choices.
As you conjure up memories of the past, your choices will affect the twins’ relationship, determine the strength of their bond, and shape the course of their lives.
Revisit your past, discover the truth, and shape your future
• Uncover the truth – Use the twins’ supernatural bond to relive and explore their conflicting childhood memories.
• Shape your Story – Influence the relationship between Tyler and Alyson with choices that will determine their future.
• Unlock even more secrets – Match wits with puzzles that deepen the story and open a window into the twins’ fantasy world, “The Book of Goblins.”
Experience true-to-life setting and characters
• Unique characters – Build relationships and solve mysteries through the eyes of compelling and realistic characters.
• Alaskan splendor – Explore locations set in beautiful, highly detailed small-town Alaska in stunning 4K and HDR.
Storytelling with purpose – DONTNOD Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios conducted on-the-ground research and partnered closely with cultural, mental health and gender advocates to craft a thoughtful, true-to-life experience.
Genres
Stats
Languages: English*, French*, Italian, German*, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese - Brazil*, Spanish - Latin America**languages with full audio support
Sums Steam only; Xbox publishes no volume signal, so the true total is higher by an unknown amount.
| Store | Price | Audience | Score | Chart | Est. revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
SteamYou are here | Free | 16.1Kreviews | 82% | — | $0 |
| Free | 7.4Kratings | 80% | — | not modelled |
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 297 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
I thought I was buying a supernatural thriller about twins uncovering family secrets in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness. Instead, I accidentally enrolled in a 10-hour lecture. The narrative feels less like organic storytelling and more like a passive-aggressive attempt to force LGBTQIA+ propaganda down your throat. It doesn't just present its themes; it guilt-trips you with them, behaving like an annoyed HR manager who wrote a script to meet a quarterly diversity quota.The dialogue is where the real supernatural elements happen, because no human beings actually talk like this. Tyler and Alyson don’t converse; they deliver carefully worded policy statements. Every time a genuinely interesting mystery or puzzle shows up, the game aggressively pauses the plot to ensure you are being properly re-educated. It’s this weirdly passive-aggressive vibe where the developers have a checklist of talking points, and if you just want to focus on the actual murder mystery, the game treats you like you're the problem.If you enjoy games like Life is Strange but prefer your supernatural mysteries without a side of mandatory, passive-aggressive ideological homework, you might want to skip this one. It is a visually beautiful game, but the writing is so heavy-handed it could probably crush an Alaskan moose. I felt like i was being asked for 15 minutes of my time to talk about people's feelings, instead of facing reality.
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Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.
Hours played at review time, across 298 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
[h2] Tell Me Why Review [/h2] Tell Me Why is a neat adventure, but one let down more by its meager story than by anything else. Don’t Nod has always done a strong job creating heartwrenching stories, and while this game clearly put real care and research into its LGBTQ representation, I do feel it falls a little short of the mark and, at times, wades into troubling territory. The game does leave you with an aching sadness, but that sadness comes more from what happened to Mary-Ann and the life she lived than from the story building toward the kind of emotional crescendo Don’t Nod has reached in previous games. The voice actors do admirable work, with Alyson standing out a little more than Tyler, whose delivery sometimes leans too hard into a stoic dudebro register. Ultimately, with only three episodes, the game does not have enough time to weave its many disparate narratives into a fully cohesive and satisfying resolution. There are good ideas here, some very good ones, but they often feel like they are fighting for space in a story that needed more room to breathe. The one thing the game does genuinely well is its representation of the trans experience. As a straight man who used to be heavily religious because that is how I was brought up, I know I am ignorant on the subject in a lot of ways. But through this game, I came to understand Tyler’s struggles in a more intimate way. It opened my mind to what trans people have to deal with just to simply exist. Mouth breathers will call that propaganda, but that is because mouth breathers call anything outside their own reflection propaganda. The game is not trying to indoctrinate anyone. It is sharing a story. And if sharing the pain, dignity, fear, and humanity of marginalized people is propaganda, then you might as well call half of American history propaganda too. From Harriet Tubman, to Martin Luther King Jr., to Emmett Till, these stories are not propaganda simply because they make the comfortable uncomfortable. They are people telling the truth of what it cost them to exist. However, this also brings me to my main complaint with the game. Without getting too specific for spoiler reasons, there is a moment where something very dire occurs, and at first it appears to be rooted in a parent’s rejection of Tyler. The story seems to be pointing toward a familiar and painful kind of bigotry. But as the truth becomes clearer, the game reframes that moment as something closer to a tragic misunderstanding, and ultimately that makes me take a beat. Not because I think the game is malicious, or because I think it handles Tyler without care. I do think the care is there. But the reveal risks implying that Tyler’s fear of rejection was misplaced, rather than fully grappling with why that fear would have felt so real to him in the first place. From my limited perspective, I can imagine that for a trans child, especially one already living with confusion, isolation, and emotional instability at home, fear would not simply be some irrational invention. It would be a survival instinct. It would be the body reading the room before the mind has the words. That is where the writing becomes uncomfortable for me. The story comes close to suggesting that Tyler projected hostility where there may not have been any, and while that may work as individual tragedy, it becomes more complicated when placed inside a story about trans identity. It brushes against the same kind of dismissive logic used against women when they are told to calm down, or against minorities when they are told they are imagining prejudice. Maybe they are not imagining it. Maybe they have simply learned, through experience, what danger sounds like before it fully announces itself. So I respect Tell Me Why. I admire what it is trying to do. I think its heart is in the right place, and I think Tyler is handled with more humanity than a lot of games would have managed. But I also think the story needed more time, more precision, and maybe a little more courage in its final stretch. It wants to be a story about memory, trauma, identity, and family, but by the end, it feels like it only has enough space to gesture at those things rather than fully land them. A thoughtful game, an important game in some ways, but not quite a great one. A 7/10 for me, which is on my scale a good game, but not quite an 8 and great.
★★★★★ Que jogo bom, sério. ♡ Acabei de pegar a última conquista que faltava e finalmente consegui platinar Tell Me Why! Tive que voltar e rejogar algumas partes pra conseguir algumas conquistas, mas valeu super a pena. Eu gostei muito da história e dos personagens, e achei muito legal ir descobrindo tudo aos poucos. Teve várias partes que me deixaram curiosa pra saber o que ia acontecer depois, e no final eu fiquei com aquela sensação de “acabou mesmo? 🥹”. Foi um jogo que eu gostei muito de jogar e fiquei muito feliz de conseguir o 100%. Agora é só guardar os prints e as lembranças dessa jogatina. ♡ Recomendo muito pra quem gosta de jogos focados em história e escolhas.
Mixtape before its time. The dialogue makes it feel like an Xbox executive is constantly watching you play. The game at least tries to connect online in the start, so there is that. It is front-loaded with the slowest, dullest background exposition known to man. Perfect for disciplining inmates with.
I didn't hate it, but saying I was neutral would be an overstatement. I just disliked this game and think it's not worth your time, even if you get it for free. I'll primarily complain, because I can't even praise this game for the graphics, voice acting or soundtrack, it's all mediocre at best, so moving on to the problems this game has: First of all, I don't know who thinks lying to your audience is a good idea. It makes it so whatever predictions you try to make are immediately invalidated, because you weren't given trustworthy information. It's as if in a 2 hour long murder mystery movie, the actual killer was introduced in the last 20 minutes, like cmon, let me theoretize and come up with my own conclusions. Secondly, the game is so. Painfully. Slow. A walking simulator, for 95% of the game without the ability to jog and a ton of interactions we could do served no purpose whatsoever. Immersion? I guess? Trying to make me nostalgic about a house I've first seen just a few hours ago? Ugh. Finally, I didn't really like the characters. I lost faith in the twins after they felt entitled enough to bother their adoptive father while at work at the police department, currently taking a witness' testimony. So instead of being understanding and just wait, they decide to break into police archives. Then the verbal abuse of Sam, which is a self-aware functioning alcoholic, that tried his best throughout the years to help the twins and their mother. Then the inconsistency of knowing their mother was psychotic and abusive, but being mad at their aunt for calling the child services to look into their situation and help them if needed. The only reason I kept playing this game was the mystery, trying to figure out who the twins' father was, finding out who tried to burn the barn, what was whose role in this whole ordeal, finding how that one fateful evening really went down. But why bother, if I was lied to for the first 4/5 of the game, so whatever theory I had is out of the window, because I'm given basic information that contradicts my theory. Ugh.
Tell Me Why e jogo Aventura tambem jogo escolhas que Você Decide história focado em escolhas e na relação entre os gêmeos Tyler e Alyson tambem história muito bom personagens gameplay sao muito bom tambem final ai que pega quase lgual Life is Strange so que história diferente desse jeito mais jogo e muito bom absolute cinema :D
Underrated story choice game. This game teaches us to accept what happened in the past and turn those experiences into our strength as we move forward in life. The past may leave scars on our hearts, but those scars help shape us into stronger and wiser people.
Tell me why is yet another one of those "made by the developers of "X"" where in reality there is no one left from the original team/s. As much as i liked LIS, the writing difference between LIS and TMW is abysmal, i tried to genuinely approach TMW with having fun in mind but the writing is just bland and it forcefully tries to make you feel emotional at multiple occasions. Decision making has no effect anywhere except of the Chapter's 3 second half, as it impacts your ending, rest of the game has meaningless decision making Soundtrack and graphics wise i think that they did a good job, OST is pretty good as it fits the scenes and their respective environments, while the graphics themself aged well for a title like this Overall experience heavily depends on the player, in my case this game was nothing more than easy and free 100% that i will definitely never play again
pensé que iba a ser basura pero me hizo sentir como el meme del minero picando hasta encontrar diamantes XD
Since this game goes free on every pride month, I expected something [b]ULTRA GAY[/b], but it's actually quite mild on that, and it's much better this way. The main plot point is that one of the twin protagonists is transgender [spoiler]try to guess which one just by looking at the screenshots![/spoiler], and there is also an optional gay romance subplot. Nothing that would upset anybody other than the most dedicated homophobes. It's a good adventure game. Alaska looks great, the environments are nicely detailed, the puzzles are solvable without moon logic, and short tales in the Book of Goblins were also really cool. It's obvious, though, that the story was cut short (originally 4 episodes were planned), as some plot threads remain unresolved, and some characters from the Book of Goblins are missing. Several reviews say the ending was lackluster, but I liked it a lot. [spoiler]The kids grow up and get to face the banality of evil.[/spoiler]
Active players
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