Raindrops on Roses (Part Eleven) -- Telltale's The Walking Dead

(trailer)
(purchase link)

The Walking Dead is a comic series that started in 2003 and has continued its singular story for the past fifteen years, chronicling the adventures of Rick Grimes as he wakes up from a coma and has to deal with a zombie apocalypse. Author Robert Kirkman has stated that he never was interested in how zombie media at the time demonstrated its endings. After all, even if the protagonists make it on a boat to some uninhabited island, there’s still a zombie apocalypse going on. Kirkman’s solution was, in essence, to not end the comic, at least until civilization was restored.

Video games don’t really have that luxury. There’s just too much downtime in between releases to hold people’s attention for more than one or two years, and that’s being generous. For a while, though, there was an attempt to match the episodic nature of serials by releasing a bunch of shorter games one after the other. The proven formula still has downtime between seasons (for examples of a failed formula, see this video about Half-Life Two: Episode Three), but it did a decent enough job at mimicking the serial format before the pressure to deliver forced the genre to collapse under its own weight.

But when it was in vogue, the pinnacle of this format was Telltale Game’s adaptation of The Walking Dead. Like Adaptation. from last week, we see an attention to deliver the themes of the piece rather than retell the story (a mistake Telltale themselves performed for their two adaptations of Jeff Smith’s Bone comic series) in its entirety. Instead of retelling Rick Grimes' story, Telltale instead decided to tell the story of Lee Everett.

Lee’s down on his luck. Once a history professor, he discovered his wife sleeping with a state senator and killed the senator for it. But while riding in a police car to his fate, the zombie apocalypse happens, and he gets a new lease on life.

In the comic, the focus is more on the relationships Rick develops with his group (the more cynical among the fanbase would say this is so it hurts more when they die (no that’s not a spoiler, it’s a zombie comic)), and the game takes a similar tack. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, sure, but more often than not the pointing and clicking is used to select dialog choices -- or other ways of responding (do you crush a man’s head with a cinder block or nah?) -- than solving obtuse puzzles. In fact, the most difficult puzzle is probably “use axe on zombie” so there’s a little hint for you.

More specifically than developing relationships with a group, though, is developing Lee’s relationship with Clementine. Clementine is an eight-year-old girl separated from her parents, and Lee takes it upon himself to find them. Now, conventional wisdom would say that child characters in video games are useless and terrible (in fact another character, Duck, is whiny and useless and generally very hateable), but strong writing and vocal performances from both Dave Fennoy and Melissa Hutchison make their relationship throughout the five episodes quite possibly the best thing to come out of video gaming’s trend of “Dad escapism” (see The Last of Us, God of War 4, and Bioshock Infinite for more examples of this trend).

The problem these dialog driven style though is that the replayability is terrible in the same way that Choose Your Own Adventure books are exciting. Playing The Walking Dead more than once reveals the cracks in the system; the places where your choices don’t really matter even if you think they did at the time. But for that one first, perfect playthrough, it’s all worth it.

-F

Next time: Possibly the space book.

Also if you didn’t know already my brother blog, Secret Asian Man has migrated over to Wordpress. You can now find him here.