That I enjoy
Telltale’s The Walking Dead video
game—nay, that I consider it one of the greatest games ever made—still
surprises me on occasion. By the time I had gotten into the game in the latter
half of 2012, I was for all intents and purposes burnt out on everything zombie-related.
The Walking Dead TV series had reached
its acme by the end of its first season and, according to most people whose
opinions I trust, has been plunging in quality ever since. The comic series had
turned into an unforgiving, nihilistic drag, with few if any sympathetic characters
remaining. And David Wong’s This Book Is
Full of Spiders subverted the whole subgenre, revealing a lot of zombie
fiction to be a kind of desperate, wish-fulfillment power fantasy that, upon
consideration, couldn’t be less appealing to me.
But the game is
a far different, if still just as bloody, affair. Set in the same universe as
the comic series but with an entirely new—and more likeable—cast of characters,
Telltale’s episodic Walking Dead game
placed emphasis on problem solving over zombie slaughter and turned each
interactive conversation into a test of mediation, trust, survival, and
sometimes a combination of all three. It put you in the shoes of a flawed but
well-meaning protagonist, whose relationships with his fellow survivors could
be drastically affected by what he did—or even did not—say. It was all the
stuff I loved about the Mass Effect
series but without its increasingly tedious combat sequences.
