At times, playing Tina Tina’s Wonderlands can feel a little like working through a hangover. This is a game with UI that reads like brain fog, clouding out mechanics with half-tooltips and miniature smallprint and systems that are occasionally hinted at but rarely explained. It’s also loud, in every sense, all booming explosions, yelling voiceovers and broad splashes of the high-contrast, primary colour scheme it paints jarringly over the world’s otherwise slushy, sludgy browns and greens. A lot of noise. A lot of energy. A lot of ibuprofen and coffee needed to figure it out.
There are a lot of examples of this kind of shouty-but-opaque approach to things in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. One of them is the game’s main collectible, Lucky Dice, which are nice, shiny gold D20s dotted around the world like the good old relics of a 3D platformer. When you find one and interact with it it rolls, popping out some loot and a number between 1 and 20 that determines something called your Loot Score. I’ve played a fair bit of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands now, and I do not know what that is. I’m assuming higher rolls are good – Tina likes to remind me it means better loot – but do they stack, or add up as I collect more dice maybe? Does it just reset to whatever the most recent roll is? There’s a very different number buried in my character’s menu screen, but how do the dice I find and roll play into that? Again: not a clue. But it’s there, it looks a bit Dungeons & Dragons-y, and it’s shiny and kind of fun, in that vacant, loot-make-brain-feel-good kind of way.
