Last week, Telltale Games released the first installment of their Walking Dead episodic videogame on all platforms except iOS (which will come later, I’m told). It’s done in the signature cross-genre Telltale style, combining role-playing staples with the action elements you’d expect from a zombie game. However, Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising this is not! In fact, this stands to be something much better than both, if it plays its cards right.
Check past the cut for a review of the first episode and some hopeful thoughts of where the rest of the game is going.
A very famous horror trope, especially in the past decade, is the self-awareness of the characters involved. For the longest time, horror characters were never actually aware that they were in a horror movie; a masked murderer would show up and slash everyone to bits before anyone could comprehend what was going on, and no one had seen or heard of zombies enough to understand how to defeat them. It’s with movies like Scream and Shaun of the Dead that self-aware scenarios became exceedingly popular; relatable characters were placed in a situation that the viewer could comprehend and react to similarly, and now most of us are sure of how we would survive things like the zombie apocalypse (and hey, if you aren’t, Max Brooks has written books about it). We don’t literally want these terrible things to happen in the real world, but your hardcore horror fan can’t be helped if they have the perfect solution to an end of the world scenario.
Not only that, but if there is one thing Telltalle did staggeringly well when they came into being in 2004, it was to develop a systematic type of gameplay based on old graphic adventure games that LucasArts used to put out (the founders of Telltale all being former LucasArts employees). Things like Sam & Max Hit the Road, the Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis were staple childhood games (at least for me), as they provided excitement and adventure while also developing cognitive skills via a series of puzzles. You didn’t just run around aimlessly clicking the mouse button or button mashing; you took the time to reason through scenarios for the best possible outcome.
In a nutshell, this is what Telltale’s the Walking Dead provides: you are in a horror situation, and a very famous one at that. How do you survive? What do you do? Whom do you save? The game offers you a litany of choices, all with immediate and longterm consequences (as future episodes are formatted to the decisions you make in this). You’re given literally seconds to choose between life and death, lies or truth in certain scenarios, and all of these elements will come back to haunt you. It gives the entire game a certain realness to it, because by being forced to choose between A and B we’re force to watch the consequences of our actions — and on occasion, the tension and terror this creates can be even more frightening than the zombies.
These combined elements is exactly what makes the Walking Dead videogame from Telltale not just good, but damn great. By ascribing the puzzle solving mentality to a game where danger lurks more viscerally at every corner, Telltale has delivered a videogame experience that consumes the player with a vigorous passion. You don’t just play the Walking Dead — you survive it.
On top of that, Walking Dead has already succeeded in a way that the show failed to (at least in my humble opinion): it makes you care. The cast of the game is almost entirely new characters outside of a few cameos, but the nearly first-person placement of the player in a life and death situation coupled with the option to get to know the characters better (as opposed to listening to people aimlessly drone about nothing on the show) allows for the more direct fostering of relationships. You aren’t just watching the action unfold from the comfort of your couch; you become responsible for this people, and their lives matter to you. You don’t want to see anyone hurt, nor do you want anyone to get bitten, and it’s much easier to care for brand new characters when they’re so intrinsically related to your own survival. At the same time, though, the reality becomes clear: every single person you meet is a potential threat, and the likelihood that you directly will have to deal with that is a very prominent element.
Of course, the downside is how short the experience is, but that length is also a plus. “A New Day” won’t take up more than a morning or afternoon of your time, giving you an engrossing and immersive experience that will leave you wanting more. The length issue isn’t enough of a problem to penalize the game, but more of a nuisance to a fan who doesn’t want to stop playing. The short game time does open it up for easy and multiple replays, though, which lets you see what could’ve happened differently had you made different choices.
Telltale has put together a very loving tribute to “The Walking Dead” that fans of the book will love. In between meeting a few familiar faces and the occasional easter egg (“Super Dinosaur” gets an amusing little shout out at one point), The Walking Dead succeeds greatly in giving a unique survival horror fitting to its namesake. If you have a videogame system or a game-ready computer, you’d be hard pressed to find as entertaining a way to play away an afternoon.
