As a fan of the comics, I was hoping that The Walking Dead would retain the tense atmosphere of "Anyone can die!" type. However, Telltale not only managed to keep it, they also managed to add an emotional side to the story. That emotional side is Clementine, a little girl that you have to protect from this new world. As Lee Everett, a former professor and a convicted killer, you must make choices while trying to maintain Clementine's child innocence and your own humanity. And that's where the game shines. Every decision you make will not only affect you, but also her, leading to some choices becoming harder due to either her presence or the change of the way she views you.
The game also benefits from using the point and click genre, which makes it accessible to all tipes of gamers, while also leading into a bigger focus on the it's plot. The use of dialogue trees leads to many alternate choices of dialogue, making you feel like you are building you own Lee, and that he is different than all of the others. Then we have the choices. The Walking Dead plays heavily on the "your choices impact the game" and the problem here is that this both truth and lie at the same time. On one side, due to the game being divided in episodes (I'll go into detail about that later), when you play one, your experience will be different than the rest. However, if you look into the whole game, you start to see that most of these choices don't really change anything, with the few that change being normally "killed off" by Telltale with no input of the player. It also doesn't help that no matter what you do, you will end up at the same final location as every other player. While I think that it makes for a better focused story, it still manages to hurt the vibe of "you make your own path" that the game tries so hard to give.
And now let's discuss the episodic structure of the game. I really enjoy it, but it also means that some episodes are stronger than others, even if together they make an almost flawless experience. So now I will quickly look into each episode separately, mentioning both it's strong points and it's flaws.
Episode 1 does a great job introducing the world and characters of the Walking Dead. It also perfectly shows the transformation of the world we know into one ruled by the dead. However, it has a minor but still annoying problem: once you reach the final location of the episode, it feels like the game drags itself to feel longer, and there's no need for that.
Episode 2 is the best in my opinion honestly. It tells the story, it's not to short and not to long and it's choices change the rest of the game.
Episode 3 is close to being as good as Episode 2, but I feel like it goes on for a bit to much and the final choice of the episode is weak and doesn't do anything for the episode or the game.
While I think everyone agrees that Episode 4 is the worst, that doesn't mean it isn't great. In a matter of fact, I think it's really good. However, so is the rest of the episodes, making it seem like this one sucks, which is not the case. Despite going on for far to long, the fact that new introduced characters take a back seat to older ones and that introduces other characters that end up not being important to either Episode 5 or the history, due to focusing on older characters it tells a more focused story with a surprising climax and a final plot twist that will sure wow players.
Episode 5 is the shortest, but I think that's great because it feats the title of "No Time Left". Clementine and Lee relationship comes to focus, every character has their fate decided, it brings up your actions from previous episodes and both the final scene of the entire sesson and it's final choice will surely make players cry (unless they don't have a heart of course). I sure did, marking the first time a videogame ever made me cry. It's even sadder because it fits the story but you still don't want it to happen, and despite the fact that you can't change how it plays out, it's great that you can change how it ends.
Overall, this is one of those games every gamer needs to play at least once. Lee and Clementine's journey is completely worth playing and is one of the best stories in videogame history. Despite my choices not changing where I end up, I don't care because if that meant ruining the ending we got, I could care less about my choices. And in the end they do matter. Looking into the game as a whole, your entire experience will be different than everyone else. While the game has it fair share of framerate issues and bugs, I ignore them because the plot completely makes up for this annoyances. I'm happy I experienced this game and I think I'd there's anyone out there not knowing if it's worth it, I will say this: this game is story about the living, with the dead serving as the imminent threat that shows how everyone really is. I happily give The Walking Dead a 5/5 stars.
