Spawned originally from the comic book, then the TV show, Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead is set in the same universe and, indeed, the same state of Georgia as a zombie apocalypse strikes and overwhelms humanity. Lee Everett is a convicted murderer being driven to prison when all hell breaks loose, setting him free as the world goes completely to hell. Very soon you come across Clementine, a young girl who has survived through this without her parents, who were vacationing in Savannah when the outbreak began. So begins your quest to keep yourself and Clem safe, find other survivors, and to face the various and extreme threats that beset your little group every day.
TWD is a point-and-click game made by some of the masters of the genre, including people from back when LucasArts was making such paragons of gaming as Sam & Max Hit The Road, the Monkey Island series, and Grim Fandango. So they know what they’re doing – and it shows in the game. The Walking Dead is a tense, melancholic affair where even the best outcomes come at a cost, where you feel intensely protective of people even as they’re pissing you off, and where the gameplay is sensible, well-paced, and works excellently with the setting. Even when you know you are safe there is a tension to the gameplay and you rarely, if ever, feel as though you aren’t under pressure to get things sorted out quickly.
What really stands out is the characters, which is damned good news for a zombie game that doesn’t go the action route. Clementine is an example of perhaps the rarest thing in all media – a child who is not annoying. Indeed, she’s incredibly sweet, she’s believably smart but still naive, and she reacts to Lee’s choices in a believable way. Because TWD is episodic and Chapter 5 is not yet out we can’t judge how this all wraps up so far so it may be it all falls apart and TTG will screw up, but so far that seems pretty unlikely. She is the focus of the game, really, and the quest on the part of both Lee and the player to protect her and, as time passes, to raise her well in that hellish world, is the centerpiece of the entire experience. It’s about choices, from the mundane conversations with Clem to life-or-death decisions that have to be made in a snap, and all of them have repercussions.
The game is not without flaws, primarily technical ones that are easily overlooked, and it would be nice to have a broader array of possible paths than exist but that would be a lot more work and is likewise forgivable. Still you can go into Chapter 5 with a variety of setups and people who have your back and it is quite feasible that what happens in the end will open up the desire to replay the game more than once. The game also does some cool little things; at one point you fight a zombie and what occurs is essentially a QTE, but the icons keep popping up and in your panic you keep hitting the buttons, even though the zombie is long ended. It’s a nice touch that makes a lot of sense and is probably the best use of QTEs since they were invented.
I would recommend The Walking Dead for anyone who wants a story-led game that is well-written, well-acted, and has a lot of tension. It’s a superb point-and-click that does damned near everything right and very few things wrong, and TTG have confirmed that a “Season 2” will be on the way at some point when they finish Chapter 5. Just to clarify, buying TWD gives you all of the Season 1 stuff including the soon-to-be-released Chapter 5. You can get a hold of it on Steam for PC, and it’s out on 360 and PS3 as well!
