In the aftermath of playing Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, Erik needs to take a little time to decompress, have a few deep breaths, and think about the experience he just went through.
We join him now, after the tears, the anger, the self-reflection, and the brief stint watching cartoons to get his spirits back up to see what he thinks, now that it's all over.
In case anybody isn't able to tell, I think that Telltale Games' adaptation of The Walking Dead might just be the best portrayal I've ever seen of a zombie apocalypse in video game form, and one of the ones that affected me on a level no other game has.
Of course, considering that I think its closest competition as a zombie game is Dead Island, the Dead Rising series and the Left 4 Dead series, it's not really that great a compliment for that first part. I enjoyed all of those games, don't get me wrong. I loved the dependency in Dead Island to keep track of just how well armed you were and that there were times you simply had to avoid the zombies because you couldn't risk losing a weapon. Dead Rising did a great job in showing sheer numbers against you when an entire city becomes infected, and the Left 4 Dead series really played up the need to rely on your teammates for basic survival, as well as those small touches of betrayal and self-preservation.
However, none of those games really made you care. Dead Rising suffered from this despite the fact you spent a majority of the time saving other people and leading them to safety, but because we never really know anything about them, it doesn't really affect us. Left 4 Dead only had four characters, and while there were small moments of communication between them, they were pretty much interchangeable as characters. Dead Island...well, it had one character I really wanted to try to keep alive, but another problem it and Left 4 Dead had was that the character I played was also interchangeable, with no real character development besides "get a better gun."
With The Walking Dead, it's all about the story and the characters, and when bad things happen, it gets you. When I first started the game, I went in with the completely wrong personality, and because of that, I suffered when things went wrong.
Now, to be fair, I didn't know that Telltale Games had it in them to make a game this dark or dramatic. The previous games I played by them were Strong Bad's Cool Game For Awesome People, their Back To The Future Series, and the new Monkey Island games. All of those games had one thing in common: "Comedy." So to suddenly leap into The Walking Dead was a bit like a child knowing Albert Brooks from Finding Nemo and then saying "Oh, look, he's in this Drive movie. I'll watch that next."
The part that fascinated me the most about The Walking Dead, however, was its affect on me and my mindset as I played. As I mentioned before, I went into the game with the wrong ideas. I thought "Hey, I kept everybody alive in Mass Effect 2 because I'm smart. I make good decisions, I've got good reflexes, and I'm sure I can do well here." The first time a choice is presented where you can only save one character, I accepted that, because it was story driven. I've seen those choices before, and in those other games, it just means you change a conversation around but the character fits into the same spot in the team as the other person.
And then things start to go wrong.
When decisions I made wound up not helping a situation, or in fact put other people in danger, I started to get worried. When the decisions I made started to get thrown in my face by characters, I realized just what kind of impact I was having. After all, in Left 4 Dead, if I let Louis rescue Francis from a hunter zombie while I shoot a tank zombie, Francis isn't going to throw that in my face during another stage or perhaps not save me another time.
And then there came the moments when I was helpless, and when I felt like the decisions I made perhaps lead to the deaths of other characters. I indicated this in my spoilerific "first person perspective" look at the episodes, but when one character died, I restarted the stage about four or five times to try to save that person simply because of how attached I had become to them. I actually started to grieve that this character had died, and felt numb for a long period afterward. There was a real sense of helplessness, that my actions didn't influence the whole world, and just how desperate things had become because people you liked or cared about could be taken away from you at a moment's notice.
This, of course, lead to the next shift in my personality. I stopped valuing life as much.
There's a moment in an episode when you have two opportunities to kill people who have directly hurt your group. I spared both of them, for several reasons. One, I wanted to be a "good guy." When I play moral choice games, I almost always take the noble route. The other reason was that I knew that if I did that, Clementine would know, and Clementine is the main reason you have a story in the first place.
However, there was a moment, towards the end, when I was presented with the same choice against someone who, looking back at it now, had not done anything near what the other two characters had done. This character had endangered someone, but hadn't killed anybody. However, when the same choice came up to take the person's life, with Clementine standing right there watching, I took it. I didn't even blink as I made the choice, and only afterward realized that I could've not killed him. The idea hadn't even occurred to me. The exact same set-up had been presented as one of the earlier "kill or don't kill" options, but instead of hesitating (thus letting the person live), I simply mashed the buttons to get it over with as quickly as I could. The connection I had to what was going on, the anger I felt towards this character, and all these moments of having the optimism and hope crushed things got worse simply lead up to this moment, and it shaped what I had become.
In a way, it's humbling to think about, and also kind of scary.
I guess I should also talk about Clementine. I came into the game fully expecting it to be a major escort mission, perhaps not to the same action level as Resident Evil 4, but with the same risk of something bad happening if I left her alone too long, like in Ico. What I didn't expect was for how Clementine would affect me. I cared about what this child thought of Lee (and, in return, myself). When Clementine would be the sole person arguing against an action, there were several moments where I took her side because I didn't want her to be disappointed in me. I was all this child had, and I didn't want to let her down.
The writers, developers, and voice talent at Telltale did a remarkable job bringing life to this character, as well as the other characters you meet. This one stands out, however, as one of the ones I felt the most connected to. Even when everything else was going wrong, the one thought that resonated in my head was "keep Clementine safe."
As far as storytellers go, I'd rank Telltale Games up with the best companies out there, including Bioware and Valve. Very few games have affected me on an emotional level as much as The Walking Dead did, and very, very few have left me feeling that my choices could not only affect things on a very big scale for a group of people, but could also have all that power taken away in a moment, leaving a genuine feeling of helplessness. It lifted and lowered my emotions like a master conductor controlling an orchestra, and I look forward to seeing what the next season brings later this year.
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