The Walking Dead (the video game), Episodes 1-4

[queenlua]

Oh yeah I've been playing through these.

In brief: if you're into reasonably strong storytelling, old school point-and-click adventure gameplay, and don't mind some linearity, The Walking Dead game episodes make for a pretty fun romp. Perhaps best enjoyed with friends; they're pretty cinematic.

• If you're going to put quicktime events into what is, at its core, a point-and-click adventure, at least make them interesting or smooth or whatever... maybe it's just because I was playing on an Xbox remote but they felt like clunky surprises than exciting, refreshing interludes from the story. (The "hammer X button repeatedly super super fast or die!" mechanic, in all games, needs to die, ugh.)


• For a game that was all about "your choices affect the story!", it didn't seem like my choices... actually... mattered that much. The choices feel pretty big at the moment of, don't get me wrong; I liked that most the negotiation-ish sequences required you to not only take a stance but back it up with repeated coaxing or aggression or reasoning or whatever, and putting a timer on very tough choices makes stuff feel pretty tense. But after an episode or two, you start to suspect that the plot would wind up the same either way, and when you look into it... yeah, that's often the case. Like, there's one scene where you're trying to decide whether or not to loot food from an abandoned car (on one hand, you guys are really short on food; on the other hand, the car's only recently been abandoned, so maybe the car's occupants will be back soon, and stealing is rude yo). I chose to jack the food because like, dude, starving to death seems unappealing... but as it turns out, it doesn't actually matter whether or not you take food from the car; taking the food just makes you kind of look like an asshole. Sigh.


• For the record, I totally called the twist in episode two, c'mon guys I know all the country folk stereotypes you can't fool me


• I was pretty delighted but how natural-sounding and strong all the voice actors in this game were. On the whole, video game dialogue seems to be getting snappier and smoother and just plain better lately, which is really encouraging; perhaps the days of FE9/10 cutscenes are behind us :P