Review: "The Walking Dead: The Game", "Episode One: A New Day"

The Walking Dead: The Game is very similar in it's game-play mechanics to TellTale's previous licensed, serialized release, Jurassic Park: The Game, only here they have been used to considerably better effect.

After Jurassic Park: The Game, which felt endless, tedious, and completely without interaction, The Walking Dead: The Game quickly establishes itself as a colossal improvement for TellTale Games. It also features a remarkably better story then Jurassic Park: The Game, too, penned by The Book of Eli screen-writer Gary Witta (good enough to even compensate for the game's shallow, binary morality-system).

The pacing here is perfect. Conversations feel immediate, dynamic, and never drag on for too long. Action sequences (all in the form of quick-time events) are surprisingly engaging, considering how easy and linear they are. Puzzles are all intuitive; none seem like gimmicky ways of stalling the player's progress, and creating artificial game-length. One segment of the game (set in the zombie-infested parking-lot of a motel), late in the first episode, even incorporates some refreshing tactical game-play. 

The Walking Dead: The Game feels fiercely loyal to it's source-material, despite never directly recreating a single scene from either the Image comic-book series or the AMC television-show. Characters from the larger The Walking Dead universe do make brief appearances (episode one features both Glenn and Hershel), but this initial episode is far more concerned with establishing it's original cast; all of whom are surprisingly well written, and voice-acted.

A well-seasoned "gamer" isn't likely to find much challenge in The Walking Dead: The Game (aside from navigating confrontational conversations, solving very simple puzzles, and mashing on the Q and E keys relentlessly during quick-times), but despite this, the game manages to maintain a thick, palpable sense of suspense through-out. During my initial play-through (roughly two hours), I died only once (it was the first possible "death screen", and I only saw it because I was texting when I should have been mashing on the Q key instead). Regardless, every encounter felt a "game-over" waiting to happen.

A review of the second episode (including spoilers for Episode One: A New Day) will be up once it has been released, and I've finished playing it.

Poem: "Where the White Water-Lillies Grow"

(for Kyra MacPherson)

Come Stranger, follow close behind me.

I will take you down to a place where the water-lilies grow white as snow,

& I'll show you a fairy sat on each; floating on the ripples, dipping her toe.

Do you believe me, Stranger?

Some are not able to hear thier fairy-song, and most are too blind to see them fly

to and fro, touching a lily-pad & then ascending again- so many it fills the sky.

The path starts here:

Come, this way, through the tall, sweeping grass aglow,

& toward the water. You might already hear their song?- no?

We are here, Stranger:

Where the water-lilies grow, & the fairies sing; a hidden place your senses deny

& your heart already knows. Thier wings are a beautful flutter, their bodies spry;

here, where the white water-lillies grow.