You might be wondering why, after the relatively superlative review of episodes 1 & 2 of The Walking Dead on here three years ago, you never saw a followup review of episodes 3 through 5. Or, indeed, any other Telltale adventure game. The answer is pretty simple: after doing a pretty stellar job of implementing a genuinely branching plotline and choices that felt like they really mattered, episode 3 of The Walking Dead revealed it all to be a sham as it hammered the reset button by killing off most of the characters who had been introduced in the previous two episodes.  After the various choices I’d made were revealed to be ultimately meaningless, and since TWD compromised pretty heavily on being an actual adventure game in order to try and maintain the illusion of those choices, this left a pretty bad taste in my mouth – I never played episodes 4 or 5 as I didn’t want to play it as a game, and once you took away the “choice” I didn’t think it was too hot narratively speaking either. There was nothing left to hook me in.

That experience put me off Telltale games for a couple of years. It seemed like the type of adventure game they were intent on making was extremely at odds with the type of adventure game that I liked to play¹, so I stayed away from them. However, after getting numerous recommendations that I should play Tales From The Borderlands (and these weren’t just “It’s pretty good” recommendations either, it was full on “This is my game of the year!” stuff) I decided to dip my toe back in. Perhaps if I went in with substantially lowered expectations – above all, not to expect anything at all from the choices the game would present me with — I could get a bit more out of Tales than I did The Walking Dead.

This turned out to be a great approach to take. Tales From The Borderlands is an absolutely stonking story which follows a pair of main characters: Rhys, an ambitious middle-manager from the Hyperion corporation, and Fiona, a fast-talking Pandoran con-woman. The two collide during a back-channel deal to acquire a Vault key that forces them to become uneasy allies in the cause of tracking down the Vault whilst avoiding bounty hunters, ruthless corporate stooges and the more unsavoury bandit elements on Pandora. Cue various misadventures in which you alternate between controlling Fiona and Rhys – sometimes working together, and other times at complete loggerheads — as you make your way through ten hours of what is now the standard Telltale gameplay of conversations-and-cutscenes.

If none of what I just wrote means a huge amount to you (Vaults? Hyperion? Pandora?) then I wouldn’t worry: Tales From The Borderlands is commendably non-reliant on knowledge of the previous Borderlands games. Some of this stuff is just a macguffin to drive the plot forward, and it does a good job of explaining the rest of it – I’d forgotten nearly everything from the two Borderlands titles that I’d played (except for Handsome Jack) but after a mildly uncomfortable opening half-hour where I struggled to remember what was and wasn’t important, I eventually realised that it didn’t matter. The Borderlands games have always been rather weak on actual plot, and Tales is very intent on using the best aspects of their cartoon setting to do its own thing. There is one semi-important plot point that gets resolved off-screen in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which is the one I haven’t played) which I found more than a little annoying, but on the whole it’s possible you might get *more* out of Tales if you haven’t played a Borderlands game before as you won’t have that weird adjustment period at the start and can just enjoy it for what it is.

The setting suits what Telltale is trying to accomplish here, too. I wouldn’t have previously chalked Borderlands up as a world crying out for more detailed exploration in an adventure game as it was only ever concerned with providing you childish reasons to shoot the next bad guy and get some loot, but in a way that’s precisely why it works: it’s so one-dimensional Telltale can do just about anything they want with it, and so ridiculously over-the-top Telltale can *really* do just about anything they want with it. Tales is very well-written, with a cast of strong characters that you form genuine attachments to over the course of the story, and a sense of humour that hits far closer to the meta-esque stylings of Archer that the main Borderlands series was shooting for. In fact if I had to describe Tales in one sentence, I’d say it’s pretty much a 10-hour long episode of Archer when Archer was in its prime (circa season 2), when it had just hit its stride and hadn’t yet collapsed under the confusing weight of its own self-referential humour.

It’s also incredibly well-directed. That’s not something I usually say about a game, but since Tales is more of an interactive movie than it is a game it does let Telltale do some really, really inventive things with the camera (when you’re playing it) and with the cinematography (when you’re watching a cutscene). The intro sequences to every one of the five episodes – each of which is a montage set to some excellent choices of licensed music — are nothing short of works of art, and far better than anything I’ve seen out of an AAA title this year. There’s a lot of re-use of assets from the Borderlands series, but this is only fair; the only real complaint I can make about the way Tales looks is that it’s using the same engine as The Walking Dead did three years ago, and that thing was creaky as hell even back them. Time has not improved it any, and while the cartoon art style again comes to the rescue to paper over the basic limitations of what the engine can do, there’s still several scenes where it’s obvious the game team are struggling against those limitations to tell the story that they want to tell.

Now, about the “game-altering” choices that have been the questionable hallmark of every Telltale game since The Walking Dead: fortunately this time I knew what to expect and went into Tales with very low expectations, which meant that I got nowhere near as irritated with it as I did TWD. It helps that the stakes are much lower; Tales is a much more upbeat series in tone, and while it does have time for some serious and particularly heartbreaking moments (like the entire introduction sequence to Episode 5) there’s never really a point where you have to make a decision that is life-and-death for a given character. As with TWD you’ll end up in the place where the plot wants you to end up and with the people it needs you to end up with; what your decisions change is how you get there, and Tales is at least a little inventive in how it varies the story according to the conversation choices you make. The broad narrative beats and important plot points are the same, but you have enough latitude to make the story your own through control over the little details – and some of the choices *do* come back to haunt you in the final episode, when certain characters are available to help (or not) depending on how you treated them during the rest of the game.

If I have one genuine issue with the choices it’s that Tales isn’t particularly good at justifying how it railroads you back on to the main storyline, resulting in some rather convoluted reasoning as to why (for example) the bad guys aren’t just shooting you in the face after you refused to ally with them. Again, though, because it’s Borderlands I had trouble taking this quite as personally as I did when TWD pulled the same stunt. I have a more serious complaint about the gameplay outside of those conversation choices, however, because it’s pretty much non-existent. Probably 70% of Tales is either a cutscene or a conversation dialogue; another 20% are some admittedly well-judged quicktime events that are played mostly for laughs (and which don’t have a failure state, as whoever you’re controlling out of Fiona or Rhys will do the thing anyway if you don’t push the button); and the final 10% is the walking-around-interacting-with-bits part that used to constitute the majority of traditional adventure games. Even during these sequences there is nothing in Tales that even remotely resembles a puzzle, and they’re used as an opportunity to crack even more jokes, some of which are quite subtle².

So pretty much the entire game is one big ten hour long interactive cutscene. That’s the sort of thing that *could* have gone horribly wrong if Tales wasn’t quite so charming and funny as it’s turned out to be; I’ve lambasted plenty of FPSes for pulling exactly the same thing and while the adventure genre is at least more traditionally structured around a strong narrative I think I’d be far harsher on it if the quality of that cutscene wasn’t so damn high. As previously mentioned, some of the directing is so strong they could easily screen this thing on television as a miniseries and I’d happily sit through every episode of it completely hands-off – the ability to influence the narrative in small ways here and there is just a nice bonus. This is how Tales neatly sidesteps my fundamental issue with Telltale adventure games outlined in the opening paragraph: by being good enough as a narrative that I didn’t care that it wasn’t actually much of a game. It’s not afraid to cut loose with silly jokes and some ridiculous QTEs (Episode 4’s “gun” fight and the entirety of Episode 5’s ending spring to mind), yet at the same time it never lets these over-the-top sequences eclipse the story it is trying to tell, which has a lot of heart and a surprising amount of pathos. Calling it my GOTY would be overselling it more than a little, but it’s more than enough to get Telltale back into my good graces. And considering how irritated The Walking Dead made me? That’s quite an accomplishment.

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Episodes one and two, obviously.

Oh, now this is interesting. The Walking Dead is the latest offering from serial perpetrators of mediocre adventure game titles based on popular intellectual properties, Telltale Games. It features zombies, a concept which at this point is more tired and decrepit than World War 2 FPSes were in the mid-00s. The parts of the game where you play it – that is, where you as the player character actually get to do a thing – are scattered few and far between, and when they do occur the game spends most of its time railroading you down a gameplay path so linear it could easily double as the Death Star trench run in Star Wars. Do not buy it thinking you’re going to get a puzzler where you use gun on zombie, because this never happens¹. As an adventure game, I have to say that the Walking Dead fails, and it fails hard.

As a story, though, it excels. When I think of the epitome of games as a storytelling medium the words that flash unbidden into my brain are “Planescape: Torment”. The Walking Dead isn’t that good, but I think I could at least stand to mention it in the same sentence without breaking down in hysterical laughter. This puts it on a very short list of games. Vampire: Bloodlines. Some of Obsidian’s stuff. System Shock 2, maybe. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as involved in a game’s story as I have in the Walking Dead’s. There were times when I didn’t want to carry on playing because I was so apprehensive about what might happen. It’s a visceral, brutal, emotionally draining experience that pulls absolutely no punches, and I finished episode two feeling soiled and tainted² by the things I’d had to do to survive and to protect the people I cared about. How many other games do this? How many other games even try? It’s an outstanding achievement, and while I personally wouldn’t go this far I can certainly see why some people are calling it their game of the year.

What is the Walking Dead, though? I’ve seen it referred to as “if somebody made a game out of Alpha Protocol’s conversation system”. While apt, this is not quite the comparison I’d go for. With the way the game is set up – a series of tense situations and crucial decisions that have to be made that is occasionally interspersed with a quicktime event where you kill a zombie – it reminds me far more of the obscure odd duck choice ‘em up King of Dragon Pass, which rested heavily on a similar collection of events and decisions with potentially far-reaching consequences. Your decisions in Alpha Protocol (mostly) only affected you. Your decisions in KoDP affected the future of the entire settlement, and it’s this feeling of responsibility for others that the Walking Dead brings to mind. Except here you’re not dealing with abstract numbers, you’re dealing with people. People with faces and names who talk and joke and have their own goals and priorities and who come to your aid when you need it and betray you when you least expect it. It makes the stakes so much more personal, and makes you feel crappy when you’re forced to stiff somebody in the name of pragmatism or the greater good or whatever.

Most of your time in the Walking Dead is spent inside the conversation interface, about which you’ll quickly notice two rather unusual things. The first is the timer at the bottom of the screen which appears whenever there’s a life-or-death choice that has to be made right now, and which does an admirable job of putting you under pressure as you attempt to process all of the information you have – the overall pros and cons, the group social situation, your own personal relationship with the characters involved – into making the “correct” decision.  It’s the second which is the Walking Dead’s masterstroke, though; every so often during a conversation you’ll give a response and a message will flash up in the top left corner of the screen, like this:

“Clementine will remember that.” “Kenny appreciates your loyalty.” “Danny notices your suspicion.” “You were direct.” “You tried to stay neutral.” This feedback is scattered throughout the game, a tangible sign that it is taking notice of your actions and that there will be consequences later. Not all of it ends up being relevant to what happens further down the line, but it’s necessary misdirection to keep you guessing as to what will and will not end up being important and introduces an important element of uncertainty to the game. You can never be sure that the decision you just made was a good one, and you end up being plagued with doubt as to whether you did the right thing as tempers flare and the relationships between the survivors begin to break down.

This focus on the group of humans and their little social dynamic is probably the single smartest thing the game does. If you go all the way back to the start of the zombie genre as a popular phenomenon, Night of the Living Dead barely features the damn things except in a few wide shots showing them gathering outside the house. The film is all about the tense situation inside it as the survivors attempt to figure a way out of their predicament, and the Walking Dead takes a similar approach. I’m not saying zombies don’t play a prominent role in this game, because they do, but it’s as an omnipresent, mostly-unseen threat rather than as physical entities attacking the player. In some ways, in fact, the Walking Dead is the zombie game I’ve been waiting for; one where the zombies function as a catalyst for the story and not as the sole point of the game itself. It makes things so much more interesting and carves out a whole new niche for the game to sit in that by all accounts has made the Walking Dead quite successful. Like I say, a smart move.

Of course this approach wouldn’t work if the game didn’t make you believe in its characters as people. The player character is Lee Everett, a convicted murderer on his way to prison. The game isn’t that ambiguous as to whether or not he did  it – you can outright come out and say you did to a couple of characters if you want – but he’s not some hardened killer who can shank a zillion zombies in the face before breakfast. He’s just a guy who made some very bad decisions, and who is granted a reprieve from his punishment when the car taking him to prison gets wrecked by a zombie in the opening scenes of the first episode. Shortly after this he encounters Clementine, a little girl whose parents have become trapped in another part of the country (and who may or may not be dead), and whom he adopts in order to keep her safe from the undead apocalypse unfolding all around them. The Walking Dead heavily stresses the Lee/Clementine releationship. Clementine may be smart and canny for her age, but she’s still a little girl and provides the game – and Lee – with a much needed streak of humanity. It becomes harder to treat situations with Video Game Logic when there’s a six year old girl watching everything you do. Even though she’s not real, even though she’s just a collection of voice-acted polygons, Clem’s opinion of me somehow mattered. I didn’t want her to stop trusting me by doing horrible things in front of her. It doesn’t rule out acting like a complete psychopath, of course, but it brings things closer to the genuinely uncomfortable sociopathy of Planescape Torment than the pantomime villainry of KOTOR.

The other survivors you encounter are a mixed bunch. I’m not going to say the writing for them is particularly outstanding, but it’s believable enough for me to buy them as distinct people with their own personalities and agendas. An interesting thing about the Walking Dead is that it doesn’t do the usual videogame thing of setting Lee up as the leader of the group because he’s the godlike player character. Lee is just a regular guy, and while he can give his opinion the other survivors won’t necessarily agree or do what you say. This is often used to set the boundaries of the narrative – certain things will happen no matter what you decide to do, which is disappointing but understandable given how complicated the storyline would be otherwise – but it’s also used to toy with your expectations of how the Walking Dead is going to work as a game. As in, it’ll make you think a certain situation is governed by video game rules – player inputs actions, game spits out feedback based solely on their performance – only for something completely unexpected to happen that was completely out of your control. Done badly this could have been a fatal misstep for the game, but instead it’s a tactic that’s utilised to great effect on several occasions. It’s a clever subversion of the Video Game Logic I was talking about above, and it’s to the Walking Dead’s credit that it plays with this as much as it possibly can.

Of course it isn’t perfect. The game is less subtle about its narrative restrictions than it could be, and it also goes too far out of its way to signpost critical decisions. I liked the conversation system because I could see my responses were being noted by the game but I didn’t know what was going to be important. I don’t like scenarios that tell you to “Save Character A or Character B!” because they boil everything down to a single decision that pays no heed to the responses I gave previously, rendering them a little bit pointless. There are several sections of gameplay that are literally on rails, and while the interpersonal dynamics are really well done the need to adhere to a strict story structure for the overarching narrative leads to Lee contracting Adam Jensen syndrome on several occasions, where he’s forced into doing something really dumb in a cutscene while the player screams impotently at the monitor. There’s also some weird performance issues that were particularly prevalent at the start of episode one, where the game would take several seconds to catch up whenever the camera angle changed. The Walking Dead doesn’t look like it’s particularly demanding on graphics cards or processors, so I’m slightly disappointed that that sort of thing made it into the final product.

Still. The Walking Dead is a brave attempt to do new things with the genre, and you’re not going to make any progress in life without making a few missteps along the way. There is one last thing I should mention before wrapping up, though, and that is that I really wasn’t kidding when I said the Walking Dead didn’t pull any punches. It features some of the most gruesome violence I’ve ever seen in a video game, and it’s made all the more graphic by the fact that this isn’t some cartoony bloodfest like Mortal Kombat, but instead a bleak story of survival during the end of the world.  Much of the violence is human-on-zombie or zombie-on-human; however, there’s still two or three moments which are frankly shocking in their brutality. Personally I thought it was a justifiable use of violence as a tool which underlined how desperate and awful the survivors’ plight was and that it wasn’t gratuitous in the slightest, but you should be aware that even if you think you have a particularly strong stomach for this sort of thing you will wince several times during your playthrough of this game, and if you don’t think you can handle watching that sort of thing then it’s probably best to steer clear.

That’s probably the only group to whom I wouldn’t unequivocally recommend the Walking Dead, though. I’ve only played two-fifths of the finished product but I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the first two episodes alone. If you don’t like adventure games you should still take a look at the Walking Dead because it isn’t an adventure game as you know it. If you don’t like Telltale games – well, neither did I, and look at me now. Everyone else should at the very least put this on their list of Things To Buy During A Steam Sale simply to see what Telltale have done here. It’s probably the first major step forward for adventure games in fifteen years, not to mention a rare attempt to tell a story in a video game that is genuinely mature and emotionally involving. I enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps you will too.

1. You use everything but a gun on zombie, but only in scenarios where you have one item and a zombie in front of you and you cannot go backwards or sideways.
2. In a good way, of course.

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