Telltale is Coming... A Retrospective Review

I'm a sucker for a good story, and video games are a passion.
So it stands to reason that story heavy games like the

With the fast approaching release of Telltale Games' latest offering, inspired by George R.R Martin's masterpiece series Game of Thrones, I decided to kick off this blog with a retrospective of Telltale's previous works.
While I'm a fan of Telltale's work I'm afraid I've only been able to play their more recent titles (The Walking Dead: Season One onwards), so this retrospective is going to be leaving out their classics.

Oh, and some SPOILERS... Duh.

Part One - The Walking Dead: Season One

As my first foray into a Telltale Games... game... I didn't really know what to expect.
I'd read and become engrossed in The Walking Dead comics, I'd watched and become engrossed in The Walking Dead TV Series, and I'd long been a fan of the zombie genre in general.
And having been raised playing old school point and click adventure games (seriously, Simon the Sorcerer was amazing!) I was curious to see how they could possibly mash the two genres together.

And I was very pleasantly surprised.

Let's start at the beginning...
The five episode series begins with our protagonist, Lee Everett, sitting in the back of a police car enroute to prison. Not the most auspicious way to introduce your lead, but it was an interesting change of pace and did evoke an immediate sense of mystery - What were you in for? Did you even do it? These answers get answered quite clearly within the same episode, which I think was a shame, but it was part of some very compelling conversations and the like so I didn't mind.

Anyway the cop escorting you starts talking, introducing Telltale's signature dialogue system. As the game goes on this system is very important, as its soon very evident that the people you interact with remember what you say and do. So this cop car confessional scene and an opportunity to work out how some of the mechanics work in a relaxed, consequence free way, without a lot of the tension and high stakes you face later.
Speaking of consequences, turns out the cop should have been paying more attention to his radio and the road than chatting with the convict, because he promptly smacks into what looks like a zombie and the car flies off the road.

You make your way out of the car, out of your cuffs and hobble off, facing your first the first real pressure as you get attacked by your very first zombie; While this part did seem very obvious (anyone even vaguely familiar with how zombie stories work would've been able to see it coming), but since it was still the tutorial that was forgivable. Especially since the controls take a little while getting to grips with, especially if you decide to go the super-realistic route and disable the little tool-tip indicators.
There are quite a number of horror movie staples throughout the series (ie. jump scares, people slipping and falling at inopportune times to increase tension), but most of the time Telltale manages to keep things balanced and realistic enough that these cliches don't bother me.
Anyway, you escape and find your way to a house, where you encounter your first of a staggering amount of quick time events. And then you meet the subject of your season long escort mission, a sweet little girl called Clementine, and the game begins in earnest.

Ain't she just the cutest?

Now, I know there are some out there who weren't too enamored with Clementine (a good number of my friends included), and I understand how being shackled to a helpless kid from the get go might not appeal to some people. But despite my original objections I actually did find my natural protective instincts quickly kick in - which is good too, because protecting Clem becomes Lee's main objective. And it's hard to get invested in a game if you aren't able to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes. Which, for me, I think Telltale did masterfully (a few kinda jarring, 'Look, I'm a kid being cute and kid-like' moments, which quickly stop once things get even grimmer)
And this applies throughout the series.
There are a lot of parts that felt a little bit like railroading, and in some instances your actions didn't end up mattering as much as I thought they would (one of the few weak points, which I'll get into shortly). But I never found myself really at odds with what Lee was doing, or how he reacted to (95% of) the things he faced.

The series continues, and lots of characters are introduced.

Part of the cast of The Walking Dead Game... Aka Ten Little Indians.

And you get invested in them. And then a lot of them die, horribly. But it's a zombie story, so that's pretty much a given. However, this brings us to what to me seems like the series' biggest weakness;
The illusion of choice. Now, for the most part I don't mind this - The game clearly has a story to tell and there is only so much freedom you can have within the format. However, there were quite a number of instances where it felt that the choices I made, shortly after turned out to have no real impact on the story.

For example, in the first episode two people you very recently met are both stuck in a tricky situation, clearly moments from being killed. The games makes it very clear that time was of the essence, and I could had time to rescue one. I decided to pick the woman, mostly because Lee seemed to hit it off with her the most in that play-through, and the other character was torn to shreds. Poor schmuck.
Now, imagine my annoyance when part of the way through the second episode, boom, she gets killed.
Just out of nowhere. I actually went back and tried several different approaches to the same scenario. Nope, she dies regardless. On a second play-through I decided to switch things up and save the guy instead. And... Nope, also killed at the exact same spot for the exact same reason.

And that to be honest is my only real issue with the game, because it happens a bunch more times, and in the sequel even more. But despite that I simply couldn't tear myself away; the writing is compelling, the characters are mostly interesting (with a few exceptions, and one that I wish you could just leave behind the first time you encounter him because he causes nothing but woe). And while I later started to see how some of them didn't have a lot of impact on the game as a whole, on my first play-through those tough decisions were absolute nail biters.

Final verdict:

I wish I could give this game a higher score, because I did become quite emotionally invested and the story was quite gripping throughout. But at the same time that is exactly why the issues that the game did have bugged me so much. That, plus the controls were a little clunky and my 'Q' key hasn't been the same since. But for a story as engrossing as this I think I can live with that.