The Walking Dead: Episode 1 Review

There was a time when I could not picture the zombie apocalypse except with a standard backdrop of a suburban shopping center or inner-city mob imagery. Now, thanks to the combination of the Left 4 Dead franchise and the excellent Walking Dead AMC TV series, when I think of zombies, I think of southern farmlands and the sound of cicadas. It’s a fresh re-imagining of the genre that is carried on with TellTale’s new adventure game The Walking Dead, based on the popular TV series. Rather than simply being a Walking Dead spin-off, the developers have made a clear and obvious effort to be true both to the original comic book and the television series. Even their website explicitly states that they see the original comic strip as “canon”, and the game promises (and so far, delivers) not only cameo appearances of characters from the TV series but also back-stories and expanded plotlines. This is a more mature title than most of TellTale’s games, and it’s gratifying to see that so much of the developer’s talent translate well into the Walking Dead universe.

The Walking Dead’s story so far is decent, which is more than can be said for most of the gaming market. This first episode is held back a little by the fact that it marks the beginning of the story, and thus has to run through the motions of introducing the zombie apocalypse. The drama of the situation comes not just from the new hell-hole world, but also from a good basic personal premise: the main character has responsibility for a young girl thrust on him, while simultaneously having to deal with a dangerous skeleton in his closet (and considering this franchise, I suppose I need to point out that I mean this figuratively). Gameplay in The Walking Dead is a mixture of dialogue, exploration, light puzzling, and quicktime events all blended together into a silky frappe of video game goodness. Rather than the jerky separation of gameplay types that we sometimes see in drama-based games, The Walking Dead is exemplary in how well all aspects of the gameplay go together: your dialogue might be interrupted by a quicktime event or your character development might come in the middle of an action sequence. The effect is that playing the video game appropriately feels like watching an episode of the TV series.

There’s a looming downside to having drama-driven gameplay: it can make most of the game feel like filler. Gamers are used to zombies serving one purpose (being grass for your character’s lawnmower) and compared to your friendly FPS zombie modes and co-op shooters, The Walking Dead has a bare handful of zombie-shooting moments. It’s a more personal view of the ‘walker’ takeover, not focusing on blissfully mowing down enemies, but instead making the action part of the drama. The puzzling in the game is so light that it hardly deserves to go by that title… after all, it’s not much of a puzzle to figure out what you should do with that axe and that lurching walker (hint: it involves swinging).

Even with such light puzzling, however, sometimes the game falls into that greatest sin of adventure puzzlers: unintuitive solutions. For example, at one point in the storyline I was held back by the fact that my character couldn’t reach a brick through a security gate’s bars. The brick sure seemed close enough… but I was willing to play along and so spent quite some time looking around for something to reach the brick with. Finally, after searching nearby, I found a cane, with a handle just perfect for reaching the brick. Heck, the discovery of the cane even got its own cutscene, so you know it’s going to useful, right? But that wasn’t the solution that the game had in mind (which I won’t spoil here), and after finishing the episode I was still shaking my fist at the fact that my character wasn’t smart enough to think of that long tool he had just found. In the game’s defense, that cane did come in handy later on as a door jam, but it felt like just a little polish would’ve stopped an obvious dead end. There’s another minor complaint about puzzling in The Walking Dead, namely that it’s dependent on selectable items, and if you’re playing the game with all your ‘hint’ options set to a minimum (which I would highly suggest), this means that you’ll be engaging in, you guessed it, pixel-hunting, sometimes for very small objects. It feels as if the game was written by a TV writer, rather than an experienced game designer.

These might sound like deal-breaker qualities, but the good news is that The Walking Dead manages to make up for these deficiencies by have excellent drama. Even the weak puzzling serves mainly to keep the drama of the episode going, and sometimes your only reward for completing a puzzle is a spot of world development. This focus on storytelling is wonderfully emphasized throughout the game, even in the hint settings that I mentioned: The Walking Dead wisely lets the player decide in great detail how many hints or directions will appear during gameplay, encouraging the player to focus more on the story than on ‘beating the game’. At the end of the episode, rather than giving the player an arbitrary score or completion percentage, the game simply shows the statistics of how often the player’s choices in the storyline aligned with other players. It’s gratifying to see that most people agreed with your decision to save a particular character, and it’s oddly just as gratifying when most people avoid the path you took.

The real star of the show in The Walking Dead is the dialogue, which takes an active hand in nearly all of your actions. The writing is spot on, both in options granted to you (which let you develop the main character in whichever way you deem appropriate) and in the reactions from other characters. The best part about the dialogue is how seamlessly it interacts with other aspects of the game. In most games, dialogue events are strictly separated from other areas of gameplay and usually serve only one or two purposes (exposition and explanation, for example). In The Walking Dead, dialogue is sometimes used to inform the player or frame a basic puzzle scenario, but it also presents the player with plot-altering choices and sometimes even (gasp!) simple, raw character development. Your dialogue might interrupt an action, or be interrupted. One surprisingly delightful feature is the ability to remain silent in most dialogue choices. It’s a twist that isn’t just a cute gimmick, but actually adds depth to your conversations in that you now have the freedom to brusquely refuse to answer questions, or quietly wait your turn in a tense argument. It makes it almost worth replaying an episode strictly to see exactly how the experience changes if you remain silent as often as possible.

This isn’t to say that everything about the dialogue is stellar: I can’t help but feel that the current standard of “walk up to a person, have a one-on-one dialogue” is a form waiting to be embellished, but the way The Walking Dead game has started off, I think we might rationally hope for better things to come. Another slight complaint is that on a second playthrough, the impact of your choices doesn’t have as much effect on the storyline as you might hope. It turns out that some decisions which seem to be plot-defining are actually railroaded into the desired path. The post-game trailer for Episode Two tantalizing shows that your decisions in this first episode will reverberate down through the rest of the ‘season’, but from what I’ve seen so far I can’t help but think that these alternate storylines will likewise be heavily trimmed to stop the branching from getting out of control. You can’t blame TellTale too much: simple mathematics shows that even having only one plot-changing decision per episode will result in thirty-two different endings by the time all five episodes come out, if the effects of those decisions remained persistent. Still, we expect great things from both TellTale and from The Walking Dead, so it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised on this issue.

The PC version of the game suffers a little from being ported. Loading screens in a game this straightforward seem a little out-of-date, and when trying to customize my controls I was presented with (surprise, surprise) an X-box controller map. Quicktime events in general don’t translate very well to a keyboard layout, but the game wisely keeps the button-mashing variety to a minimum, so it’s not too much of a bother. Most quicktime events are of the kind where you’ll need to quickly aim the cursor (usually at a zombie’s head), and these have been artificially hampered somewhat on the PC version to make it more difficult. The engine also seems to halt slightly at key moments, but on the bright side the chosen pastel style excellently fits the Walking Dead franchise (something that TellTale could’ve easily messed up), and the music feels worthy of the series.

The best compliment that can be given to The Walking Dead video game is that it has temporarily slaked my thirst for more Walking Dead TV episodes. Playing through the game feels like watching the show, and I just might go through this summer eagerly waiting on each new game episode. For fans of the show, The Walking Dead isn’t just some cheap cash in, but a legitimate attempt to add to the Walking Dead mythos. Those unfamiliar with the series may still find this title worth a shot, as long as they’re prepared for drama-driven gameplay.