This is surprisingly good! I like their opting for a photorealistic style and dropping faux interactive walking sections for straight up choices. Actually makes it quite a refreshing interactive film experience. The production values and acting on show are impressive.

An interesting thing about the Telltale/David Cage offshoot 'choose your own adventure' genre is that often compromises in the wealth and meaning of choices can be interesting in itself.

In the first season of the Walking Dead I was at first intrigued by how your choices were made to not matter - because of course they wouldn't! You're a single member of a larger group and can't shape everything. Unfortunately, it later compromises the integrity of this fine line by overly manipulating the chess pieces it has in play to keep the narrative on the same route in an unreasonable way. It defies the time travel rule.

Planet of the Apes robs you of all impactful choice for the first four out of five chapters. The only effect you can have is in shaping your characters' mindsets (which affects their passive dialogue later on and restricts their choices available to them) and your relationships with other characters (which also affects events). Otherwise, the other characters walk all over your decisions and take over your actions, but in a way that at least makes sense. As soon as said characters are out of the picture, you suddenly have the autonomy to exact change and turn on the brakes to end the war. Treating replaying the game like the time machine it is, it even seems true to life that people say much the same thing whatever you choose to say. They say people speak in monologues, so theoretically reactive changes should more often be subtle additions on top of commited-to sentences. That's very much how the game plays it.

It's very much a subtle upshot to what is actually quite a big negative against the game. But given nearly choice driven games have these limitations, it's great to see some consistency in the metagame of realising the game's limits.