The Walking Dead: Episode One Review

If you’ve been living in some sort of ignorance all your life then I suppose I should tell you that Telltale Games focus on point/click adventure games, and they’re pretty damn good at their craft. After tackling two other previous licenses, Back to the Future & Jurassic Park, Telltale has decided to get their hands dirty (literally) with The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead
Developer: Telltale Games
Price: $5 [per episode, $25 total]
Platform: PC (reviewed), PS3, & Xbox 360

The game opens up with Lee Everett who’s being given a friendly (or not so friendly depending on your conversation choices) trip in the back of a police cruiser. It’s heavily implied that Lee may have killed somebody, but he never confirms nor denies it, but your choices in the first episode clearly indicate that this information will become a major player in future episodes. You quickly meet up with the 8-year old Clementine and your fun adventures through a zombie infested Atlanta kicks off from there. The story plays simultaneously with the comics so while you play as new characters, you’ll meet and see some familiar locations whether you’re a reader of the comics or the show. You’ll be presented with choices to make throughout the story that will not only branch you into different directions in the story, but the characters you interact with will change depending on how you speak to them and what choices to make. Very rarely do I care about characters in a game (even in games I like) but I couldn’t help but like Lee and Clementine. Both characters provide an interesting dynamic that you rarely see in games and the game even gives you the option of either molding your Lee into a caring father figure for Clementine, or be a total dick to her. As a person who prides himself on trying to be the biggest dick possible in games, I just couldn’t take those options; for once I actually cared about what happened to these characters and didn’t want to fracture their relationship. Not you though Ducky, just know your time will come. The game will take you around two to three hours to finish which feels about right with the full game taking a good fifteen hours if this first episode is a good indication on the length of the following ones.

So you’ll control Lee with the left analog stick and move the cursor with the right; once you hover the cursor over an interactive object you’ll be given a prompt to either use it or have Lee talk about it. At certain times you’ll be given a QTE to perform, but these are done pretty well and come rarely so it’s not a troublesome inclusion. Conversations are handled in a Mass Effect style with some moments giving you a timer to quickly respond before it decides for you and you can’t go back to re-select previous options; I’ve noticed it tends to prefer the “…” option, I guess the game is shy. People who like to see all the options in a conversation might end up hating this, but this is what multiple runs are for. Things you pick decide how characters will react to you at that moment and later on in the game which is going to be interesting to see how they balance that through 5 episodes. The moments with zombies are done well enough with the cursor used to hover over any approaching walker and requiring a quick button hit for Lee to perform whatever action needed. The zombie kills aren’t as brutal as Telltale hyped up (besides one in the beginning with a hammer) which is a shame since they wouldn’t stop talking about how over the line they went with the kills, but hopefully they were talking about the other episodes.

One downside many adventure game veterans might frown at would be at the extreme lack of puzzles in the game. So far we’ve only seen Episode One, but I’d be surprised to see if anything changed. On one hand it does make some sense to not include puzzles in a *slightly* realistic setting where having a character try to find the pieces to a puzzle box wouldn’t really fit, while on the other hand the puzzles they actually have aren’t really puzzles and are more “Click on everything until you find the right item”. There’s one moment later in the game where Lee needs to reach through a gate to pick up a brick to use as a distraction but for some reason he simply couldn’t reach for it when it was right there. I figured I need something to break the lock on the door (still confused considering the remote was within arms length) and the objects you interacted earlier were all viable candidates to use in both breaking the lock and reaching out to get the brick. It probably took me around 20 minutes of walking around for Lee to finally say “Maybe I should go help [person] with her problem” and after finishing that objective I finally had an ax I could use to break the lock. Sure, I felt kinda stupid wasting my time when I could have gone to do this mission to get what I needed, but the game really set things up to imply I needed the objects I interacted with earlier; plus that remote was right fucking there. I just hope the next episodes don’t follow this trend of unclear ‘puzzles’.

So the game takes a more stylized look based off the comic book and it really was the best choice. Everything just has a very slick look to it and the way the characters animate has a bit more charm to it that I don’t think would’ve worked if the game was done in a more realistic graphic style. The sound itself takes many cues from the TV show which works well enough too. One thing that kept throwing me out of the game (figuratively, not literally) were the sudden drops in frame-rate. These would happen during hectic moments such as zombie attacks or even during areas such as walking around the farm. It’s noticeable enough to remind you that you’re playing a game and it surprises me considering it’s not a very intensive game to excuse having it.

The Final Word
If you’re a fan of previous Telltale Games’ works then there’s no reason why you should skip out of this game, but I still recommend new players to come join in on the fun. The first episode is a measly $5 so if you don’t end up liking it then it’s not like you invested a lot in it.

– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair