The Walking Dead (video game series)

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The Walking Dead
File:The walking dead telltale game series logo.png
Genres Interactive drama, graphic adventure
Developers Telltale Games
Publishers Telltale Games
Composers Jared Emerson-Johnson
Platforms Microsoft Windows
OS X
PlayStation 3
PlayStation 4
PlayStation Vita
Xbox 360
Xbox One
Android
iOS
First release Season 1 – "A New Day"
April 24, 2012
Latest release Season 2 – "No Going Back"
August 26, 2014

The Walking Dead is an episodic interactive drama graphic adventure video game series developed and published by Telltale Games. Based on Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic book series and its television adaptation, the series consists of two seasons with five episodes each, and one downloadable episode from Season 1.

The game takes place in the same fictional world as the comic, with events occurring shortly after the onset of the zombie apocalypse in Georgia. However, most of the characters are original to the game. Season 1 centers on university professor and convicted criminal Lee Everett, who rescues and subsequently cares for a young girl named Clementine trying to protect her from the dangers of zombies and dangerous people while preserving her innocence. Season 2 focuses on Clementine herself as she is emotionally and physically challenged by the dangers of the world as as her childhood innocence is slowly diminished by the difficult choices she must make.

Concept

The Walking Dead series is based on the comic series of the same name, but also has tied into the television series adaption of the comics. The game's events run concurrently to the comic, starting at the onset of a zombie apocalypse, where dead humans have become undead "walkers" that feed on the living which quickly overwhelmed most of the population. As established in the comic and show, this is a result of a virus that all living humans possess that takes over the brain of the body once the person dies, and the only way to stop this is to destroy the brain.

The game series initially starts in Georgia, with the whole of the first season and the events of 400 Days content taking place within the state. The second series follows the protagonists as they move north along the United States' eastern seaboard, believing there to be a human encampment in the north as well as the colder temperatures slowing the walkers' speed.

Gameplay

The Walking Dead games follow the same point-and-click adventure game approach that other Telltale Games episodic series have followed. Within an episode, the player controls a protagonist as the story progresses through several scenes. Within a scene, the player can move the character to explore the area, examine items, and initiate conversation trees with non-player characters; in these dialogs, the player has the option of selecting a number of options to reply to characters, including the option to stay silent. Other scenes are based on cinematic elements using quick time events in which the player must hit a controller button or a keyboard command as indicated on screen to react to an event. Failure to do so in time can lead to the character's death or other undesirable ending, and the game will restart just prior to these scenes.

All choices made by the player in The Walking Dead are tracked by the game, and certain choices ("determinants") will influence later scenes across the episodes and the series to date, when the player continues from the same saved game state. For example, in the first episode of the first season, the player has an option to save one of two non-player characters from a walker attack; the other character is killed, while the surviving character will uniquely impact other aspects of the story. Other times, selection of certain dialog options will influence the attitude of a non-player character towards the protagonist, and can manifest in later scenes as providing additional options for the player to select from. Telltale Games tracks these decisions, including five main choices made during the course of each episode, allowing players to compare their choices to others.

Series overview

Season 1 (2012)

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Main article: The Walking Dead (video game)

At the onset of the zombie apocalypse, Lee Everett rescues young Clementine whose parents had traveled to Savannah prior to the apocalypse. They join with other survivors in Macon, Georgia to protect themselves from the undead, taking shelter in a defensible motel. When their position is overrun by both walkers and scavengers, the group flees and heads towards Savannah hoping to find boats to flee the mainland. Lee promises to reunite Clementine with her parents while teaching her rules of survival in this new world. In Savannah, they find no boats, and a strange man communicating to Clementine via walkie-talkie. When Clementine goes missing, Lee in his panic searching is accidentally bitten by a walker. With his time short, Lee assures the safety of the remaining survivors and goes to rescue Clementine, held by a man who has blamed Lee directly for the death of his family. Lee and Clementine overwhelm the man, and as they escape, they witness Clementine's parents, who have already become walkers. Clementine drags a weakening Lee to a safe location, and Lee, in his final moments of rationality, directs her to find the other survivors, before telling her to kill him before he fully becomes a walker.

"400 Days" (2013)

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Main article: 400 Days (video game)

"400 Days" is a downloadable special episode. It focuses on five different protagonists and it serves as a bridge between Season 1 and Season 2. The five stories are unconnected outside of a final scene, where the survivors of each story are offered to be taken into a safe camp.

Season 2 (2013–14)

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Main article: The Walking Dead: Season Two

More than a year after the first game, Clementine is separated from the other survivors and forced to fend on her own. She meets up with another group that are attempting to flee a man named Carver, who runs the human survivor camp at a strip mall, as alluded to in 400 Days. Clementine learns Carver seeks to capture Rebecca believing her to be carrying his child while she insists it is her husband Alvin's. They come into another group, discovering that Kenny, one of the survivors that Clementine traveled with from the first season and who had lost his wife and son to walkers, has managed to survive. In the midst of a walker attack, they are captured by Carver. Learning that a massive walker horde is approaching the strip mall and will readily overrun it, the group manages to escape with other prisoners, killing Carver in the process after he kills Alvin. During their escape, a woman that Kenny had taken a romantic interest in is bitten by a walker, forcing Clementine to intercede to kill her before she can turn, angering Kenny. As they regroup, Clementine becomes close to Jane, a loner that was part of the prisoners at Carver's camp and who teaches Clementine survival skills. Later, Rebecca dies after giving birth to a child, which they name Alvin Jr. As winter sets in, Jane and Kenny become hostile towards each other, and Kenny's distrust of the group leads to a fraction of them fleeing from Kenny, Jane, Clementine, and Alvin Jr.. Jane forces Clementine to see what Kenny has become from witnessing the deaths of his loved ones by faking the death of Alvin Jr., and Clementine is forced to intercede, killing one of them and opting to continue with the other while overseeing to Alvin Jr. herself.

Michonne (2016)

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Main article: The Walking Dead: Michonne

In June 2015, Telltale announced a three-episode series The Walking Dead: Michonne. The mini-series will release on February 23, 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; February 25, 2016 for iOS and Android; and March 1, 2016 for PC, and will serve as a tie-in between the existing The Walking Dead seasons developed by Telltale. The series will mostly focus on the Michonne's untold story on what took Michonne away from Rick, Ezekiel, and the rest of Rick Grimes' trusted group and what brought her back.[1] Samira Wiley will voice Michonne in the game. The mini-series was originally scheduled to be released as downloadable content for Season 2.[2] However, in December 2015, Telltale announced that the game would be released as a standalone title that would not require any previous game in the series to play.[3][4]

Season 3

A third season of The Walking Dead is expected to be released by Telltale in late 2016. The new series is planned to not only tie in all the possible endings that players from previous seasons may have taken, but as well as to draw in new players to the series. In an interview with IGN, Kirkman stated that the third season will bring the video game even closer to the comic book's current time frame at the time of its planned release. This season will take place a few years after the second season, and will include a somewhat older Clementine, though Kirkman did not affirm if she will be the playable character.[5][6] Telltale is working to adapt its previous data about player choices from the first two seasons, which were saved locally to a player's computer or console, to work with their new cloud-based saving approach, so that these previous choices will affect how the story in the third season will play out. Telltale is expected to provide more details around the 2016 Comic-Con.[7]

Cast and characters

The Walking Dead video game series introduces new characters developed by Telltale for the games. Season One is based around Lee Everett (voiced by Dave Fennoy), a Georgia college professor who had been charged with murder, and was in the midst of being sent to prison at the start of the walker outbreak. Lee escapes and encounters young Clementine (voiced by Melissa Hutchison), hiding in her treehouse after her babysitter had turned and her parents not yet back from vacation. Lee becomes a protective figure to her to help reunite her with her parents. Within Season Two taking place about a year later, Clementine is now the central character, struggling to find a place in several survivor groups.

Other major characters include Kenny, a fisherman who has suffered numerous losses of family and loved ones and has become emotionally unstable, Jane, a young lone-wolf woman that teaches and warns Clementine about Kenny's instability, Carver, a principle antagonist of Season Two that seeks out the group of survivors that Clementine has joined believing one carries his child, and A.J., the newborn infant that Carver seeks who Clementine takes care of after his mother succumbs to the elements. The fate of several characters are determinant based on the actions that the player has taken in previous episodes, or otherwise unresolved within the narrative of the games. As the game takes place within the comic's universe, there have been some character crossovers with the series; Hershel Greene, Shawn Greene and Glenn Rhee, three characters from the comic series, have appeared briefly in Season One, while Michonne is featured as the playable-character in the Michonne mini-series. Kenny, Lilly, Duck

Critical reception

Season 1 and "400 Days"

The Walking Dead has received critical acclaim, with reviewers giving praise for the harsh emotional tone, the characters, story and the resemblance to the original comic book, although criticizing the graphical glitches. The game received over 80 Game of the Year awards and many other awards.

"Episode 1 – A New Day" received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 85.14%[8] and 84/100,[9] respectively, for the PlayStation 3 version, 83.87%[10] and 79/100[11] for the Xbox 360 version, and 83.38%[12] and 82/100[13] for the PC version. The game received various accolades including the IGN "Editors' Choice", PC Gamer "Editors' Choice", Xbox Editors' Choice Award, and the PlayStation Gold Award.

"Episode 2 – Starved for Help" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 86.53%[14] and 84/100,[15] respectively, for the PC version, 86.26%[16] and 84/100[17] for the Xbox 360 version, and 85.90%[18] and 84/100[19] for the PlayStation 3 version. The game won the GameSpy E3 2012 award for "Best Adventure Game".[20]

"Episode 3 – Long Road Ahead" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 88.47%[21] and 88/100,[22] respectively, for the Xbox 360 version, 86.11%[23] and 87/100[24] for the PlayStation 3 version, and 85.41%[25] and 85/100[26] for the PC version. IGN's Greg Miller gave the game a 9 out of 10, saying "It's a disturbing, depressing and entertaining entry in a journey that's been nothing short of excellent so far."[27] GameSpot gave the game an 8.5, saying "The Walking Dead has passed the midway point of its series of five episodes with every indication that the game will keep getting better right through to its inevitably depressing and unsettling conclusion."[28] MTV also gave it a positive review, saying "Telltale has created a series of wrenching, emotional decisions in the middle of a collection of not-too-hard puzzles in a visually-impressive adaptation of the Robert Kirkman comic series (with some nods to the TV show)."[29]

"Episode 4 – Around Every Corner" received positive reviews, but to a lesser extent than the previous episodes. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 84.00%[30] and 80/100,[31] respectively, for the PC version, 82.50%[32] and 82/100[33] the Xbox 360 version, and 78.94%[34] and 81/100[35] for the PlayStation 3 version.

"Episode 5 – No Time Left" received critical acclaim. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 94.75%[36] and 89/100,[37] respectively, for the PC version, 88.15%[38] and 89/100[39] for the Xbox 360 version, and 87.75%[40] and 88/100[41] for the PlayStation 3 version.

"400 Days" received positive reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic calculated scores of 78.20%[42] and 78/100,[43] respectively, for the PlayStation 3 version, 78.00%[44] and 78/100[45] for the PC version, and 76.88%[46] and 80/100[47] for the Xbox 360 version.

Season 2

The Walking Dead: Season Two overall received positive reviews from critics. In addition, particular praise went to the atmosphere and protagonist. However, it was heavily criticized due to its short episode lengths, limited interactions with the environment, lack of hubs, absence of a wise adult character to replace Lee, and shortage of poignant thrills between main characters that made season 1 noticeable.

Episode 1 – All That Remains received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 81.29%[48] and 82/100,[49] the PC version 78.76%[50] and 78/100[51] and the Xbox 360 version 77.50%[52] and 80/100.[53] Matt Liebl from GameZone gave the episode an 8.5/10, stating that it "...is just a taste of what's to come -- a mere setup for the horror that awaits us in the final four episodes."[54]

Episode 2 - A House Divided received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 87.29%[55] and 82/100,[56] the PC version 81.39%[57] and 81/100[58] and the Xbox 360 version 79.44%[59] and 80/100.[60] Mitch Dyer from IGN gave the episode a 9.5/10, saying it is one of the best episodes Telltale Games has ever made.[61]

Episode 3 - In Harm's Way received positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 82.43%[62] and 80/100,[63] the Xbox 360 version 82.25%[64] and 82/100[65] and the PC version 82.22%[66] and 81/100.[67]

Episode 4 - Amid the Ruins received mixed to positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 79.22%[68] and 78/100,[69] the PC version 78.58%[70] and 78/100[71] and the Xbox 360 version 72.00%[72] and 71/100.[73]

Episode 5 – No Going Back received positive reviews, higher than its predecessor. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PlayStation 3 version 81.67%[74] and 87/100,[75] the PC version 79.19%[76] and 78/100[77] and the Xbox 360 version 77.00%[78] and 84/100.[79] Mitch Dyer of IGN gave the episode a 9.5/10 saying that the finale is "an impressive and intelligent episode, and among Telltale Games' finest stories."[80]

References

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External links

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