Telltale's The Walking Dead is an adventure, story-focused game centered around Lee, a man living in a world ravaged by the zombie apocalypse. It made waves back when it released due to how it approached a narrative-based experience, as well as because of one of its main characters, Clementine.
It's undoubtedly an influential game, but one that never quite clicked with me, even though I'm very fond of story-driven games. Seeing more recent games that do what it does better, I think my dislike boils down to just two things: the game being too ambitious for its own sake, and the script not being that great.
When I talk about ambition, I'm not necessarily referring to tech, though it has to be said, it's one of the game's biggest detractors. Telltale's engine has long been known to be an issue, and TWD makes that pretty evident. It's a clunky game, with severe framerate issues despite not looking all that good and presenting rather wonky animations. Were it not for the fact that the voice acting and general direction were pretty good, the game would have been dead in the water as a story.
It's more about the fact that this sort of branching narrative, with many life-or-death decisions, is a production hell. The amount of branches can rise exponentially with each decision, and unless you keep them under control, the game can be outright impossible to develop. The ways in which TWD manages its branching are... less than elegant.
The game was originally released in an episodic format, with five different installments that tell the story of Lee from the beginning of the zombie apocalypse to his fate in the ravaged world. A lot is put towards reminding you that each character will remember your choices and might resent you if you wrong them in any way.
The reality is that choices will almost never matter, and the ones that do will probably not make it past the episode boundary. So much is said about choices that result in character deaths, but the reality is, characters are basically treated as disposable, constantly dying and being replaced as the story proceeds.
Often, the game will give you a contrived choice to save one character or another, but then just a few scenes later, it will kill the survivor in an even more forced manner, or otherwise just remove them from the story. Episode 1 alone has two instances of this, and it's an issue that plagues the entire series.
This ties into how much I abhor the game's script: for starters, character motivations make no freaking sense. People in this world are incredibly petty, prone to out-of-character childish tantrums, and you can spoil them all you want and still have them stab you in the back because the plot needs them too. Some people will commit suicide because the script needs them out, or sacrifice themselves for people they openly hate. It's insane.
Plus, every tired zombie cliché in the book is here, and then some. I respect clichés as a way to construct stories, but this is a game where zombies will telepathically make people trip, will materialize in perfectly safe areas, will attack quickly and relentlessly in the worst possible moments... Heck, in one particular occasion, the script will summon a horde of god knows how many running zombies in the middle of nowhere, in broad daylight, and try to play it straight. It's just not good writing.
Playing it straight is, to me, the nail in the coffin for TWD. When I look at something like Until Dawn, which came out three years later, that feels pretty clear. Not to go too deep into that game, but Until Dawn uses almost exactly the same mechanical framework and also tells something of a horror story with a lot of shock value.
However, UD establishes pretty quickly that it's trying to emulate a very particular sort of horror flick, and also that every character in the cast has exactly two brain cells and both are focused on getting laid. Whether you like the game as a whole or not, these facts make it a lot easier to accept when those same characters make stupid decisions. Contrast with TWD, though, it actually tries to pass off the dumbassery of the cast as serious and emotional, and it's very tough to swallow.
In fact, aside from Lee and Clementine, the only characters I even remember from the game without having to look at my notes are the ones that die in particularly infuriating ways. And honestly, even for the main two, their story only starts to pick up in the fourth episode, with the first three being so worthless I doubt I would have finished the series if I didn't already have the physical version with all episodes back when I played it.
Even then, the final two episodes offer a mix of really good storytelling moments and really bad ones instead of mostly bad ones. The ending is a real tearjerker, but all in all, I don't think it was worth it to endure the entire series just for that moment.
It's undoubtedly an influential game, but one that never quite clicked with me, even though I'm very fond of story-driven games. Seeing more recent games that do what it does better, I think my dislike boils down to just two things: the game being too ambitious for its own sake, and the script not being that great.
When I talk about ambition, I'm not necessarily referring to tech, though it has to be said, it's one of the game's biggest detractors. Telltale's engine has long been known to be an issue, and TWD makes that pretty evident. It's a clunky game, with severe framerate issues despite not looking all that good and presenting rather wonky animations. Were it not for the fact that the voice acting and general direction were pretty good, the game would have been dead in the water as a story.
It's more about the fact that this sort of branching narrative, with many life-or-death decisions, is a production hell. The amount of branches can rise exponentially with each decision, and unless you keep them under control, the game can be outright impossible to develop. The ways in which TWD manages its branching are... less than elegant.
The game was originally released in an episodic format, with five different installments that tell the story of Lee from the beginning of the zombie apocalypse to his fate in the ravaged world. A lot is put towards reminding you that each character will remember your choices and might resent you if you wrong them in any way.
The reality is that choices will almost never matter, and the ones that do will probably not make it past the episode boundary. So much is said about choices that result in character deaths, but the reality is, characters are basically treated as disposable, constantly dying and being replaced as the story proceeds.
Often, the game will give you a contrived choice to save one character or another, but then just a few scenes later, it will kill the survivor in an even more forced manner, or otherwise just remove them from the story. Episode 1 alone has two instances of this, and it's an issue that plagues the entire series.
This ties into how much I abhor the game's script: for starters, character motivations make no freaking sense. People in this world are incredibly petty, prone to out-of-character childish tantrums, and you can spoil them all you want and still have them stab you in the back because the plot needs them too. Some people will commit suicide because the script needs them out, or sacrifice themselves for people they openly hate. It's insane.
Plus, every tired zombie cliché in the book is here, and then some. I respect clichés as a way to construct stories, but this is a game where zombies will telepathically make people trip, will materialize in perfectly safe areas, will attack quickly and relentlessly in the worst possible moments... Heck, in one particular occasion, the script will summon a horde of god knows how many running zombies in the middle of nowhere, in broad daylight, and try to play it straight. It's just not good writing.
Playing it straight is, to me, the nail in the coffin for TWD. When I look at something like Until Dawn, which came out three years later, that feels pretty clear. Not to go too deep into that game, but Until Dawn uses almost exactly the same mechanical framework and also tells something of a horror story with a lot of shock value.
However, UD establishes pretty quickly that it's trying to emulate a very particular sort of horror flick, and also that every character in the cast has exactly two brain cells and both are focused on getting laid. Whether you like the game as a whole or not, these facts make it a lot easier to accept when those same characters make stupid decisions. Contrast with TWD, though, it actually tries to pass off the dumbassery of the cast as serious and emotional, and it's very tough to swallow.
In fact, aside from Lee and Clementine, the only characters I even remember from the game without having to look at my notes are the ones that die in particularly infuriating ways. And honestly, even for the main two, their story only starts to pick up in the fourth episode, with the first three being so worthless I doubt I would have finished the series if I didn't already have the physical version with all episodes back when I played it.
Even then, the final two episodes offer a mix of really good storytelling moments and really bad ones instead of mostly bad ones. The ending is a real tearjerker, but all in all, I don't think it was worth it to endure the entire series just for that moment.