The Walking Dead game (2012)

I’m going to start this off by saying the creators of The Walking Dead game are bad people and they should feel bad. This is, of course, not to say that the game itself is bad – in fact, it’s fantastic. It’s incredibly moving and every turn will present you with another hard hitting question or decision that pushes you, as a survivor of the zombie apocalypse, to your very limits.

The Walking Dead game is a point and click game (with a few quick time events sprinkled throughout) developed by Telltale, the people who brought us Tales of Monkey Island. It tells the story of Lee, a man convicted of murder, and Clementine, an eight-year-old girl, as they try to survive through the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. The two are brought together by chance when the patrol car Lee is being transported in gets into an accident with a walker and Lee must fight to survive. He finds Clementine along the way – she’s hiding in her house, where she had been babysat while her parents were away in Savannah.

The entire game hinges on the decisions you, as the player, will make. Will you tell strangers about your past? Who's going to live and who's going to die? How are you going to keep everyone around you calm as more and more walkers continue to appear, hungering after your living flesh? Any and all actions have intense repercussions, and often in ways that you could never expect. The story itself is intensely gripping. Each character has their own story and will react in their own way to the decisions you make.

Thus, every time you play and make a decision differently, you alter the course of the game. Where one character might have died in your first play through, they could live in your second. Outcomes, punishments and justifications will all change as you move through the game in various ways. And, man, the storylines in the game do not pull any punches. Some characters that I at first hated I came to like, while others lost my respect due to different reactions. Sometimes it didn’t quite make sense, or I imagined something I had Lee say coming off in a different context, but I suppose that can be chalked up to the stress that everyone would be under in an apocalypse.

The entire game is presented in a comic-book style, where you can see lines and brush strokes coming off of the characters. This cartoony representation in no way diminishes the gore – in fact, it makes it almost worse. All of the characters are extremely expressive, with mobile faces and large eyes. What’s also neat is that there are a variety of body shapes – no stick-figure women and buff men are to be found here. Each character, even the walkers, seems separately molded to fit into a world of varied people. The walkers tend to look a little odd after a while, with skulls for faces, but in truth they’re only a small part of the game. But yes, varied people of different shapes and sizes! Varied races! The main character is not a know-it-all white guy!

I don’t want to spoil any of the chapters, because honestly they’re far more hard-hitting as you play through and discover the story along the way. Some things will be painfully obvious, hinted at with an unsubtle hand, but it’s all in the reveal. To offer you some kind of a measuring stick, the show doesn’t have anything on this game in terms of storytelling. The only thing I wished they’d done differently was make the puzzles harder. This game is pretty easy to get through with a lot of basic observation and exploring every nook and cranny. I suppose, then, the meat of the game is the story and its characters, and it in no way disappoints.

I just hope you get a better initial ending than I did.