The most successful episodic adventure yet
The Walking Dead by Telltale Games is an adventure game that puts you in the role of Lee, a man with a dark past and even darker future – as you travel the gameworld with a variety of other characters, you point-and-click in classic adventure game fashion, mash a lot of buttons, select dialog choices, and (if you’re like me) try to be as little of an asshole as possible so you don’t accidentally offend these fictional characters that are, overall, fairly well written. And then there’s Clementine, your eight year old baseball capped companion who you discover parentless and alone in her treehouse. A lot of Lee’s decisions are based on what’s best for Clementine and some of the best moments in the game are with her. She’s endearing without being cute; you grow to want to protect her just like Lee does.
While most of the gameplay involves making on the fly dialog choices, most of which are timed (some brutally so), the game also consists of adventure game sections in a traditional sense. If you’ve played Telltale’s earlier Sam & Max games or any number of classic LucasArts adventures, you know what to expect – explore the environment, collect items, combine items together, and generally click things in the right order to solve the puzzle at hand. Lee walks at a glacial pace which means these sections often slow the action way down, a sharp contrast to the quick-time events that do everything they can to threaten the life of your Q and E keys. Mix in some pretty rough shooting and melee combat sequences, some of which involve you clicking your combatants incoming fists to block, and you have the entirety of The Walking Dead’s gameplay.
The story does a good job of moving things along so that you’re never in one place for too long. The progression keeps you from backtracking too often and the episodic format provides for good stopping points. The way the tension ramps up at the end of each of the five episodes means that you will probably want to stop and take a break, maybe keep your heart in your chest. Characters have natural arcs where they become more and less assholish as the story demands though, like I mentioned previously, I based a lot of my dialog choices on trying to make as many people like me as possible. The game will often demand that you take sides in an argument, even though both sides seem like terrible ideas, and if you don’t pick a side then both characters will call you out for it. Even then, sometimes its best to just select the “…” dialog option – something I found myself doing as the situation became more and more dire.
The Walking Dead provides a satisfying experience, but my issues with the game came primarily when it reminded me it was an adventure game. None of the puzzles in the game are particularly difficult. Like I said, it’s all about clicking things in the right order to progress to the next story sequence. Bits of the gameworld are highlighted so you know what you can interact with, something that leads to you clicking on a television only for Lee to remark “It’s a television.” Yes, I know that, so why let me click it in the first place if there’s no point besides maybe hearing all of the dialog Telltale decided to record? The QTEs, as in every game, are annoying but short. Any shooting or melee sequences are mercifully forgiving, probably because they aren’t very well designed and often feel floaty and bad. At least it’s not a hard game – I only had to repeat a section maybe twice in my whole ten hour playthrough. Like the espionage RPG Alpha Protocol, the parts of The Walking Dead were the dialog sections. I challenge Telltale to craft a whole game around these tense, emotional moments and don’t include all the other “fluff” that really only slows the game down. It might shorten the game, but it’s already pretty short anyway – an issue that doesn’t become a problem when you realize how many times it’s been on sale for half-off or more on Steam. I paid $12.50 and easily got my money’s worth from the experience, but I can’t say I would’ve missed any of the adventure game-y sections had they been stripped from the game entirely.
The graphics pay homage to their comic book roots by having a similar style with hard lines and slightly exaggerated features. The characters look good for the most part, but some of the textures in the game are just garishly low-res – the game has a knack for zooming in on the lowest res’d textures too. The sound is quite good, with lots of squishy gore noises when fighting zombies, and the voice acting does justice to the mostly excellent writing. The Walking Dead is a great experience – they just need to tighten up the gameplay mechanics outside of the dialog sections, and then it will be a great game as well.
