The Walking Dead

You are in a room with a small number of strangers. You have been trying to make sense of what has been happening along with trying to survive the dangers that is in the present. There is tension in the room while everyone waits for a decision to be made. You are looked upon to speak your voice. But, no matter what you say, your choice will bring a fate worse than death to someone in your group, without you being able to do anything. And the only reason you want to continue living this life is to protect an eight year old girl.

The Walking Dead The Game is an awesome game! It is it's own story in the Walking Dead universe where you play the role of Lee in trying to help your group survive the zombie apocalypse. The game is very much centered around you making important choices to help out the fellow survivors. If you have been following the game series at all, Telltale Games has been releasing a new episode of the game about every month and a half since April this year. The season has concluded with the release of Episode 5 11/21/12 and will have the first season on disc coming 12/4/12.

You play as Lee Everett, an African American man who was on his way to jail at the time of the zombie outbreak. Along the way, the cop driving the car gets into a crash and you suddenly see that things are not alright. You see a creature that looks human but is obviously not, a zombie. From here, you have to kill your first zombie. You don't know much about them but you can see that they are dangerous. You then leave and wind up stumbling to a house. At the house, you meet a little girl name Clementine. Clementine is 8 years old and as far as you can tell, her parents are gone and you have no idea where they are. This is only the beginning.

The crux of the game is how you will make decisions to how you want to play. Not every decision is black and white, in fact most of the decisions are gray. And this is how the story becomes your own, since you can decide if you save this person over that person, or when choosing sides, having the option to be in the middle or not say anything at all. And each choice is a viable choice, there is no good choice or bad choice. It all depends on how you want to play and how you want Lee's morals to lie.

The gameplay is very similar to a point and click adventure game. You mostly talk to the other survivors and learn something about them or explore around an area to figure out a puzzle. It is simple enough that someone who doesn't play games could get it. The only times you need fast reflexes is when the time is running out on a difficult choice. These moments are tense and sometimes you just end up saying something to try to make people feel better without putting much thought into it, very much like real life.

While the primary antagonist is the zombie force, most of the time you will have to worry about your group and how they feel towards you. A scenario that happens early on to help show this is when there are 10 people in your group and you only have 4 pieces of food to give to them and you must decide who gets the food. Is it the old man who has not been feeling well, do the kids get it, your best friend of the group, what about yourself? These are the tough decisions that you have to make and live with the consequences. And even better, at the end of each episode you get to see the stats of what choices people around the world also made!

The Walking Dead is a great example to show how to tell stories in video games. You can easily have people watch you play and they will have a good time as if it was a movie. But you also have to make choices throughout the game to make your story different from someone else's, making this a perfect interactive story. I highly recommend it!

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