Guest Article: The Walking Dead Season 1 Review by Telltale

Article written by Nick 'Telltale' Taylor.

Review of The Walking Dead

A little while ago, the Spike TV Video Game Awards were held and a quite surprising thing happened. A game won the Game of The Year award which wasn't Mass Effect 3, Assassins Creed 3 or any other big budget AAA game with a 3 in the title either. It was a Point n' Click Adventure game. For those of you not familiar with the Point n' Click Genre, it basically died at the turn of the century and hasn't been relevant for over a decade. It was so dead that publishers flat out refused to fund games in the genre, even ones made by developers like Double Fine, who are basically comprised of all the biggest names in the Genre's history. With the rise of casual gaming and the desire for AAA story content, Point n' Clicks are in the perfect position to make a resurgence, and that seems to have started with The Walking Dead.

What is it?

The Walking Dead is an episodically delivered Point n' Click adventure game series based on the comic series from Image Comics and is considered Canonical, it's not just some side story that may or may not have happened, it's officially part of the universe. The game follows the journey of Lee Everett, a man on his way to jail for Murder when the Zombie Apocalypse occurs. On this adventure he meets an array of survivors who are trying their best not to get their brains eaten (actually, the zombies don't seem to care what part they get to eat) and not starve to death or get killed by other survivors. Throughout the game the player guides Lee through some tough decisions, helps him to make friends and loose them and occasionally gets to shoot some zombies in the head. Technically, this is Season 1 of the series. There has been no official word on a Season 2 as far as I am aware, but given the ending and the fact that it won GOTY at the VGA's it's pretty much a given that it will happen.

Story

The story is easily the game's strongest point, it's heavily character-driven and involves some of the most organic choices ever presented in gaming. Everything you choose to say (or not say) will affect how the other survivors you meet view you, who will back you up and who will leave you behind at the first sign of trouble. There is no morality meter here, there are no Mother Theresa or Vlad the Impaler binary choices, often none of the choices available will even be all that great. There is also a timer on choices that forces you to make them on your feet without being able to take a breather and think about it, which really adds impact and tension to making decisions that many other games lack.

The story starts off with Lee in the back of a Georgia State Police Car, being taken away after his Trial for Murder (while it's never fully explained in the game it seems to be implied in some dialogue that the death occurred accidentally when Lee went to confront the man who was having an affair with his wife). During the trip the Police car gets into an accident and Lee wakes up hours later still inside the car with the Driver dead outside, with blood and spent shotgun shells littering the floor. Lee escapes the wreckage and discovers that it wasn't the crash that killed the Cop, but Zombies, and they are now EVERYWHERE. He escapes by running to a nearby building and hiding inside. It's here that he meets the second main character, Clementine, an 8-year-old girl whose parents were away when the outbreak struck. Lee decides to take care of Clementine and resolves to escape the Zombie-infested town. From there the story is shaped by the decisions you make, for example you can choose to escape immediately in broad daylight and meet Shawn and Chet, but if you wait for the cover of darkness you will meet a cop with Shawn and Chet will have died to zombies. From there he journeys to his home town of Macon to see if his family has survived the Zombie hoards, shacks up with a group of survivors in a roadside motel, takes a train to Savannah and more.

Everything in the game is heavily character-driven and the characters are diverse and really well written. Each one has a distinct and deeply fleshed-out personality and is voice-acted in a good and believable way. The quality writing and character-driven aspect of the story makes it really easy to get into and caught up in. Each episode is a fairly self-contained story that leads into the next until the closure of the 5th and final episode which ends Lee and Clementine's story.

Structure, Graphics & Gameplay

The Episodic format of the game is really well presented and each episode has a pretty decent length, clocking in at around 2-3 hours. Each episode is also broken into small “chapters” that flow seamlessly together. My only complaint about the delivery is that you can't seamlessly move from one episode to the next, credits roll and you have to select the next episode from the main menu. The Graphics are quite simplistic (following the hand-drawn style of a comic, favouring rough lines and caricature more than realism) and the animation is a bit stiff at times too, but thanks to the nice visual style it actually manages to convey some really good emotions on the characters' faces and can induce some serious cases of the feels.

Mechanically the game is very simple, it's even less complex than the Point n' Clicks of old, there isn't too much in the way of puzzles and there isn't any item combining or anything like that to worry about, it's almost entirely character interaction with the odd segment where you have to shoot or sneak about thrown in. It's almost verging on the animated visual novel side of things. This will appeal to the more casual gamers or people who put story above anything else, but gamers more used to engaging mechanics and gameplay might find themselves getting a tad bit bored at times. The game is definitely more at the “interactive movie” end of the spectrum.

 

The UI is minimal, objects of interest are highlighted (which can be disabled) and all that you can really do is click on things in the right order.

 

Conclusion

It's hard to talk about The Walking Dead without spoiling things because it's so narrative-driven. It's not the most amazing game ever made, the graphics are nothing fancy (although nicely stylized) and there are certainly people who won't enjoy it due to the lack of actual mechanics and interactivity, but it really does have a great story and it sucks you in. Let's put it this way: It's from a relatively small developer and is far from a AAA title, but it still managed to beat out games like AC3, Dishonored and Mass Effect 3 for GOTY at the Spike TV Video Game Awards. If you like Narrative-driven games then this is one you can't miss. Even if you aren't into story-driven games, it's still worth taking a look at. Think of it like a choose your own adventure TV-show.