The Walking Dead Review

Adventure games have been seeing a big return in the last few years.  With the rise of the downloadable market, many developers have saw a great opportunity to fund these games on their own as most publishers in this day and age will not fork out the money needed to make these games.   One of the developers at the forefront of this big adventure game renaissance has been Telltale Games.  This California-based studio has built a reputation among the game critics and hardcore gamers for creating quality episodic adventure games such as the Tales of Monkey Island and Back to the Future games.  While successful, Telltale never had the breakout success they were looking for.  That was until The Walking Dead, which has been their biggest commercial and critical success to date.  With The Walking Dead, Telltale takes adventure games in new ways by adding more interactivity during cut scenes and making every choice you made matter.

The Walking Dead is set in yet another zombie apocalypse, something that has become a tired trope in many forms of media by now.  What sets The Walking Dead apart from most other games set in a zombie apocalypse is the focus on the survivors.  While the zombies or walkers as they are known in The Walking Dead are the main threat, they are not the only threat.  The Walking Dead makes a point of showing how living people can be as or more dangerous than the dead walking amongst them.  You play as Lee Everett, a convicted murderer before the apocalypse, as you work together with a young girl named Clementine and a group of survivors in order to survive.  From Macon to Savannah, Lee and the group travel across Georgia to find a safe haven.  The journey is never easy as the group faces some incredibly tough and sorrowful decisions; decisions that reverberate throughout all the episodes of The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead is an incredibly tense game.  From simple conversations to big gunfights, everything you do in the game feels important and effects the way people feel about you and interact with you.  It really makes you feel that Lee is an extension of yourself.  There are no black and white decisions in The Walking Dead, only shades of grey.  Each decision you make in conversations or at big set moments will always have some sort of consequence, sadly not all turn out for the best.  While the storytelling and decision-making are the stars of the show, Telltale also adds some great ways of immersing you into cut scenes and other set pieces.   From shooting down waves of walkers to mashing buttons to fight off enemies, you are always immersed in the game as it is the difference the life and death in The Walking Dead. 

While an incredible game, The Walking Dead is not perfect.  Like most Telltale adventure games, The Walking Dead suffers from the occasional lip syncing and slow down issue.  Nothing too serious, but it can get a little annoying after a while.  Another little nitpick with The Walking Dead is how simplistic the puzzles in the game are.  It does keep the game going at a great pace and keep gamers from getting frustrated with obtuse puzzles, but eliminates much of the challenge of The Walking Dead.  Much of the difficulty I personally had with The Walking Dead came when the cursor would stick and take forever to move.  This issue happened more times than I would have liked and really took me out of the game as I fought with the controls.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead is easily the benchmark for modern adventure games.  It can easily be enjoyed by fans of the series or people who could care less about the TV show and comic like yours truly.  The Walking Dead is an experience like no other in this medium.  You will laugh, cry, get scared, and be disgusted, shocked, surprised, intrigued and every emotion in between.  When everything is said and done, you will be amazed at how much you care about each and every character you meet and interact with in the game and contemplate on what could have been if you did things differently.  The Walking Dead is an excellent game that should be experienced by all gamers mature enough to play it.