Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands breathes weird, new life into the stale franchise

polygon.com:

Since the pandemic began, tabletop role-playing games have been having a moment, and actual-play performances of TTRPGs are having their moment within that. By good timing alone, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, the Borderlands spinoff set in an off-the-rails, fourth-wall-crumbling D&D-style campaign, has bullseyed two pop culture trends in one shot. It’s lucky, sure. It’s also pretty good.

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It’s also a refreshing reintroduction to the things that made Borderlands such a personal obsession for me back in 2009. When the franchise debuted that autumn, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski hailed Borderlandsas “Diablo for a generation raised on first-person shooters.” Thirteen years later, they’ve perfected that vision by giving the franchise a richly detailed, high fantasy veneer, inside a canonically consequence-free science-fiction wrapper.

In case story matters to you — and if it does, you might be in the wrong department — Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands puts the player in a pencil-and-paper campaign under the direction of Tina, the adolescent munitions expert introduced in Borderlands 2, leering behind the DM’s screen. A couple of transitions, from the mental space of the bright and colorful Wonderlands to the fluorescent bowels of a crippled spacecraft, quickly establish the idea that everyone is role-playing to pass the time until they’re rescued. All of this has anchors in