Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
A new and unique Black Mirror episode came out and its a interactive episode where you to make choices. Its a really interesting and neat idea and think its worth going through. It got me to pay for Netflix. Since it is Black Mirror things can get weird and psychological. I do recommend this! There are several main story endings and it will allow you to see them. It seems the paths to get to these endings varies so its definitely a conversation item. The rest of this post will have spoilers so please don't read if you haven't seen Bandesnatch yet!!
I went into this blind so I didn't think it would be about games. But we learn quickly that the main character Stefan Butler likes this choose your own adventure book called Bandersnatch. And Stefan is a game programmer and pitched his game based on the Bandersnatch book to a game company. This is were the first major choice comes in. You get a choice of either accepting the deal to work on the game in the studio, or refuse and work on the game at home. I choice to accept it and Colin says I choose the wrong path. It then jump skip to the game launch time and Stefan's game got a low review. Stefan says he can do better and we get jumped back in time to the choice of accepting or refusing the deal again. At this point I get where this may be going. There are more of these kind of choices where one of them choices just leads you to a bad end and you have to choose the other one in order to proceed in the story. Which is something that happens in actual choice making games.
When you chose one of the choices and its a bad end you get a screen with only one choice which is to go back and you get to choose the other option to continue. And when you get a main ending this screen will still come up and you can go back. It seems it can tell what you've already done so it will try to take you to a path you haven't seen yet. It will keep doing this till you've got them all it seems? When you got it all the credits will roll and there be a small scene at the end. I've read someone only got some of the endings and got the credit roll and think its also time based at 90 minutes.
The most interesting bit for me in this episode is where you can choose to follow Colin instead of going to see the therapist. I chose to follow and Colin offered use some weird drug which I took. Colin was the only one who seem to see through this "game" thing. He told Stefan than they are like Pac Man. Programmed in a game to run around in a maze over and over again. He says PAC stands for Program and Control which I laughed at since that's not true. Pac Man is a Japanese game and Pac comes from the Japanese words "paku paku" which is onomatopoeia of the open and close mouth movement. Anyways, Colin says the only way to get out is to jump over the maze. Colin makes you choose who gets to jump. Choosing Stefan only results in a minor ending, but choosing Colin resets you back to the part where you choose to follow him this time you can't. Since Colin jumped he is now missing. He did pop up in a small scene which was weird, but after that he never appeared again.
Another thing that was fun is when Stefan understands that someone out there is controlling him and asking for a sign, you get a Netflix choice. And it was fun to try to explain to him what Netflix is. This leads to me favorite ending where Stefan needs to see his therapist and she says it doesn't make sense since they're just ordinary people who aren't entertaining. She then suggests that they need more action to be entertaining and you get a ridiculous scene. You can choose to fight the therapist or jump out the window. I chose to fight and it was a riot. I've read what choosing out the window leads to Stefan watching the actor that play him or something. I didn't get the option to go back and choose that. This is one of the possible endings. The other endings weren't too bad, but I didn't find them memorable. Storywise its short, but there's definitely many varieties that happen in the same scene so there's definitely a lot of work put into this. Overall I do enjoy the experience more than the story I suppose? I do like the idea of the story about being stuck in a game and realizing someone you can't see is making you do things. And I hope more like this comes out. Looking forward to what season 5 of Black Mirror will be
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