My partner and I have a date night once a week. The purpose of which being that we spend some time together in the same room, usually playing a game. Of course we are usually in the same room together anyway, but each doing our own stuff. The Walking Dead is not a two player game, but I got some say in the decisions that were made for Lee.
We played the game on my partner's PC, but with a plugged in PlayStation 3 controller. Although the controller was recognised, the buttons on the screen displayed as XBOX buttons, which led to a lot of panic and confusion when we had to hit the non-existent "A" rapidly to avoid death.
Sometimes the controller decided that an entirely different action was taken to the one that was wanted, but it usually didn't work out too badly.
The Walking Dead is affected by the choices you make as a player. The things you decide to do, and the things you decide to say, affect the options you are left with from that point on, and how people will treat you. Specifically, whether people will be keen to side with you or take you with them if the current arrangement goes to shit.
Personally, we always tried to go for the more amicable and diplomatic-sounding of the dialogue choices, perhaps due to my fear of offending even fictional people. Sometimes, being neutral can still rub characters the wrong way.
You have to strike a difficult balance of being nice to everyone, awful as they may be, in order to secure your survival. But coming first, of course, is Clementine.
Your character, Lee, is being taken to prison in a police car after being convicted of murder. Doesn't sound much like a guy you'll warm to, but nonetheless. The car winds up crashing, because zombies are everywhere. He finds his way to a nearby house where he meets Clementine, a little girl all on her own, who he of course has to take with him. And so the adventure begins.
The Walking Dead is full of a lot of death and risk and panic. You may wind up somewhere horrible, but having made a different decision earlier may have put you in a situation just as bad. The game has a way of making you second guess yourself, and wonder if so-and-so's death would have been prevented if you didn't screw-up somehow. But it's brilliant.
It's a fairly riveting game that I couldn't wait to have another session of. It took my partner and I roughly two or three sessions to get through an episode, and there are five of them in season one in total. Of course, season two is now out, but he isn't keen to start that for a while after all the stress of the first.
[Spoiler alert]
The ending was honestly a shock to me. The players are made to go through so much with Lee, that I thought he'd be fine. He'd somehow live for season two, cutting his arm off would work or maybe the bite just wouldn't have infected him. Right up until the last minute, I just didn't believe that he would die.
I suppose this shows that Telltale Games wrote a spectacular story. It stays with you. You think it over and wonder if there was anything different you could do. It's a small, five episode game which is a spin-off of an existing franchise. And yet it has profoundly affected me.
I think that games that made me feel the way I also do about The Walking Dead, are the reason I needed to start a game blog. I look back on my older posts and cringe at my style of writing. But games should be blogged about. Not only because more people may discover them, but because they should be acknowledged for the fantastic, involving method of storytelling that they are.
This last image haunts my brain.
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