The Walking Dead: Season One

I have finally finished playing through Season One of Telltale's excellent 'Walking Dead' series. It's taken ages.

I started playing it on PC, but I found the control interface really fiddly and irritating. Also, it had a bug where the woman I saved in Episode One was suddenly mysteriously dead in Episode Two. "You saved this other guy!" claimed the game, confidently yet incorrectly. "No I didn't!" I growled. I had liked the woman. She had nice hair. The guy was a jerk. I had deliberately let him die.

So I stopped playing the PC version, which I like to think taught it an important lesson in respecting my choices as an individual.

See? She's got much nicer hair than him. Die, Doug! Die!

Because choice is what this series is all about. Every now and then the game will thrust a dilemma in your path and you have to choose what to do, usually against a ticking clock. It's not always about life or death choices. Sometimes it's about being diplomatic or aggressive. Revealing truths or playing cards close to your chest. Siding with one person or another.

It's a good mechanic and it works well in the world of the game. Which is, of course, the post-apocalypse, zombies-everywhere, oh-no-arg-help-I'm-being-eaten world of The Walking Dead. It's a world created in comic book form by writer Robert Kirkman in 2003 which has found incredible success on television and now in a series of also-pretty-impressive video games.

The premise of the world is simple but elegant. Zombies happen. Civilisation collapses. People try to survive and, in doing so, establish various forms of community. Stripped of the civilising influence of law and social convention, people reveal themselves to be selfish, cruel and easily corrupted. Or sometimes heroic. That's where we come in, making our choices.

This isn't a new idea, of course. The idea of zombies destroying society goes back to the 1960s, with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead,  and has found many iterations since. But the genius of Kirkman's take on the zombie genre is that he sticks around for a long time after the initial breakout. He's interested in the long term consequences. What power structures will humans form? What does it mean to be a leader? Who do we become when the lights are off for more than a few days?

I started the game again on my X-Box 360, a couple of years ago. I was much happier with the controls and romped through the first couple of chapters. It was a great experience. I'm not sure how much actual control I had over events, but I sure felt responsible. People died in front of me, quite a lot of the time. And every time, I felt guilty. There must have been another way.

The truth is, there probably wasn't anything I could have done. The game is sneaky like that. The choices it offers don't meaningfully affect the flow of the overall story. They can't, really. The narrative would branch off in too many directions for any game to keep track of. And a well told story needs shape and structure. You can't completely abandon that and let the player decide. Players are idiots. They'd just sit around eating crisps. That's not a story.

But the choice is important for a different reason. When we make choices, we feel attached to the outcome, in a way that we wouldn't if things just happened beyond our control. There's a psychological investment in the way a story unfolds, once we believe ourselves to be responsible for that unfolding. It's clever, and it works.

Anyway. Before I could get onto chapter three, I got a PS4 and I'm afraid the poor old X-Box 360 went from being an awesome game machine I worshipped to being a heap of white junk that I hated. I'm fickle like that.

And I kept thinking, "Oh, I should really play the rest of that game." And I'd stare at the 360, gathering dust under a shelf, and it would stare back at me full of bitterness and resentment. And the desire to finish the game would collapse against the - much stronger - desire to not have to plug it all it again and get dust in my face.

But then, to my delight, just before Christmas, the game was really cheap on the PS4. And so I bought it - yet again - and played through the first two chapters - yet again. And then I kept going and I kept going and finally, finally, finished the thing.

It's very good.

He's cutting her hair. Not stabbing her in the head with scissors. Just to be clear.

The characters are well drawn, thanks to an excellent script and strong vocal performances from the cast. It looks great - keeping to the aesthetic of the comic books, with extra points for how gross the zombies look. The plot is inventive and keeps moving along, using the restrictions of the game format to its advantage. Each chapter focuses on a couple of locations and gives the player chance to explore them, developing characters and narrative through a series of exciting game events. The changes in pace and location keeps things fresh, while the story develops believably towards a strong, moving climax.

I have a few criticisms. Firstly, the illusion of choice, though sometimes done well, is often tedious and transparent. Progress through a level tends to depend on the player jumping through a series of hoops - go here, pick up the thing, go there, put the thing in the place, go there, tell the person that you put the thing in the place.

There's little room for spontaneity and improvisation and it often feels like you're just doing stuff just so that the game can pat you on the head and say, "See? You did all that stuff! You certainly are demonstrating your ability to make meaningful choices!" But there wasn't any choice, really. The game was just waiting for you to go through the right sequence of things so it could unlock the next bit.

There's also an attempt to add world detail which can be quite frustrating. There are lots of cupboards to open, bits of junk to pick up, doors to open etc. Once in a while these will yield something of interest. But if they don't, your character's internal voice appears to mock you. "I don't have time for that!" he'll snort, as if you are a complete idiot for even thinking of opening a drawer.

"If you're going to be so precious about it, why put the option there?" I shouted, on more than one occasion.

Overall, though, the game is a beautiful and engaging thing and I'm glad I got round to finishing Season One. There's real emotion in the relationships between the characters and a sense of profound loss when they fall into a horde of the undead, never to be seen again.

There are a whole bunch more Telltale games, a few of which are also based on The Walking Dead. I have started Season Two, but - true to form - I've become distracted by Dishonored 2. Maybe I'll get round to it by the next console generation.

In the meantime. If you haven't played this excellent game, I massively recommend it. A major step forward in narrative game design.