Stranger Things 3: The Game Review

"The Show, With Pixels"

Campaign

July 11, 2019 at 8:18pm
By Jason Stettner

As a tie in with the Netflix Original series, this pixel based release is based on Stranger Things 3. To build on that, this is essentially an exact remake of the show’s third season, but in a game format. It’s definitely an interesting idea and one that’s enjoyable to play. I will mention that the game itself is entirely comprised of spoilers as it follows the events of the show exactly as they play out.

There are chapters to match the episodic numbers and everything else from this season, that being said it does expand the concept further. That is accomplished through side missions that can be discovered within the open world environments. The narrative follows the lead group of characters across their respective branching story lines.

That gives a sense of freedom as you can complete the missions in whatever way you’d like. You do however still need to finish them as a bunch, prior to getting more quests to work on. You won’t skip any sections, but can acquire extras to play through.

Gameplay

The art style is pixel based and quite detailed. The controls are streamlined and easy to understand. You’re mostly bashing enemies such as rats or the Russians. Other enemies come in the form of boss fights, those were interesting. Aside from regular hits you have power based attacks and some specialty skills.

Each character is unique and you collect more as you complete the quests. You can swap them on the fly and are always in a pair while playing. This allows you to swap for puzzle solving challenges. The puzzles are fairly simplistic and not a drag to run through. With this being somewhat open world there are minor side areas to explore. You roam through decent sized iconic landmarks to complete quests. With that, there's some loading. It doesn't take long, but there's quite a fair bit of it.

You can also collect items for crafting, creating trinkets will provide bonuses for your party. The trinkets are usually specially crafted items. Dialogue is delivered in speech bubbles, or cinematics which is neat.

The Conclusion

The Stranger Things 3 game delivers a fun, yet exact to the show experience. I definitely suggest watching the show first, as it will be spoiled by playing this game. The game is however a good replacement if don’t want to stream it. There’s a quality amount of game time here and I found it rather fun to play.

If you’ve watched the show you may find this slightly boring to play through, that does of course depend on the particular individual. It’s a simple throwback pixel type game and I thought that worked well for what it was. It has some neat mechanics, it captures those iconic moments and can be quite fun to roll through. At least, I thought so.

Read our Castlevania Annivesary Collection Review
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Stranger Things 3: The Game Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by BonusXP

Rating Overall: 7.5