Let’s Do Some Crimes!

In which Brett discusses the perils and merits of video games. 

THE WALKING DEAD

Welcome to this, the inaugural “Let’s Do Some Crimes!” column.  The column is so named because, after years of roleplaying and video games, I realized that they all pretty much boil down to theft, arson, and murder.  Sure, you’ve got the occasional game where all you do is harvest mushrooms, but that probably involves illegal transportation of agricultural goods over state lines.  Also, gathering mushrooms is super lame.  I’m assuming people still play games like Farmville, but I can’t be sure because I have a scorched earth policy of blocking anyone on Facebook who’s ever asked me help them buy a cartoon shovel.  For similar reasons, I can’t tell you if people are still listening to Bon Iver on Spotify.  But we’re not here to talk about my stupid friends and their ridiculous insistence on “adopting” limpid-eyed anime farm animals.  We’re here to talk about doing terrible, violent things for good reasons.  We’re here to talk about each of us experiencing a simulated moral degeneration into our own versions of Walter White.  (If you’ve never seen Breaking Bad, you’ve stumbled onto the wrong website, and you should probably leave.  I hear YouTube has some great cat videos).  We’re talking about doing some crimes, which is why our first protagonist is so appropriate.  But more on that in a moment.

The Walking Dead is a franchise that appears to have superseded our culture’s tendency to gorge on a particular meme and move on.  The “zombie thing” appeared to have glutted the market, much like werewolves in the 80s, and more recent infestations of vampires and Harry Potters.  (My prediction for the next contender?  Mummies!)  So the mainstream Zombie Renaissance, fueled by the show on AMC, has been a pleasant surprise to all of us nerd zombie fetishists.  It’s almost as if the show somehow managed to infect the corpse of the zombie meme and resurrect it, lurching into our cultural consciousness with a ravenous appetite for…yeah, I think you get where I’m going with this.

The Walking Dead game is set in the world of Robert Kirkman’s comic books, and it really hits you over the head with this (in a good way).  If you’re already a Kirkman fan, the game looks gorgeous, like a comic book come to life.  If you’re not into comic books, the game may look a little cartoony.  In either case, you become immersed in the storyline very quickly, with minimal fanfare.  This, of course, is the bread and butter of the zombie genre: normalcy being shattered by a gradually escalating threat.  Unfortunately, the “normalcy” represented in the opening scene is that of an African-American guy being transported to prison.  

Wow, a black guy in the back of a squad car in the South.

Way to really explore the space, writers.

We learn that our hero is Lee Everett, disgraced former college professor and convicted murderer.  While some of these details are clearly helpful in establishing tension later, it feels as though Telltale went through a sort of one step forward, two steps back process when creating this character.  Creating an African-American main character in a video game (where positive images of black men tend to be under-represented) seems like a good thing.  Explaining that this character is a member of a college faculty (where African-Americans tend to be under-represented) seems like a good thing. However, that this smart, charismatic, successful black man just happens to be a convicted murderer (where African-American men tend to be way over-represented) seems like it backfires.  Lee’s race doesn’t seem to move the story along; in fact, in a game populated by freaked-out white people from the South, the complete absence of attention paid to his ethnic background is almost eerie.  So, we’re left with a sort of Zen riddle of racial politics: Why does the murderer have to be black?  Why does the black guy have to be a murderer?  I suppose this may be addressed in later episodes of the game, but for now I was left hoping that one day we’ll live in a world where the black intellectual isn’t also a criminal (and where Donald Glover gets to play Spider Man).

But hey, enough of that intellectual cul-de-sac.  Let’s talk about gameplay.  The dialogue options reveal a dynamic that is, in my opinion, one of the biggest selling points of the game.  Lee is given multiple dialogue options during each scene; these options represent significant choices (i.e. to lie or tell the truth about his past).  Whichever choice you make may have a downstream impact on the storyline, and it’s impossible to tell in advance what that will be (sometimes honesty may NOT be the best policy).  However, here’s the kicker:  these conversation options are available only for a few seconds.  You have to read them and choose a response very quickly, or else lose the opportunity to respond at all.  So, no looking up the “best” response on a wiki while you’re playing; just go with your gut and hope for the best.  This gives the game a sense of urgency and uncertainty that interacts nicely with the zombie apocalypse theme.  I really stressed over how to respond during some of my conversations in-game, but only for a few seconds.  I was forced to decide and move on (to the next crisis) by virtue of the game mechanics, and this gave the game a more visceral feel than most others I’ve played.

This dynamic isn’t limited just to dialogue choices, either.  There are multiple instances during which Lee has to decide, essentially, who lives and who dies, with no way to save everyone.  These decisions, too, have significant impacts on the storyline.

The urgent life-or-death choices in the game contrast starkly with the actual gameplay.  In fact, there is relatively little traditional gameplay at all.  Rather than being the actor playing Lee Everett, the feel is that you are the director of a film about him.  Action scenes are rare in the extreme, and mostly serve as interstitial material between long, beautifully animated cutscenes.  The interface is clunky (at least, on the PC version), and combat is frankly kind of goofy.  This is NOT the game for you if you’re a 13 year-old twitch-gamer who is genetically incapable of doing anything but making headshots in TF2.  Realistically, despite being set in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead is mostly a roleplaying game with some puzzle-solving flavor.

Feel free to get up and get a snack.

You won’t have to click anything for another couple of minutes.

I have one more caveat for my fellow gamers.  It’s been my experience that many of us play games to exorcise the demons of bad decision-making in horror movies.  (When faced with a scary situation in game, we all know better than to separate from the group, and we’re always looking around for anything we can use as a weapon when the shit inevitably gets real).  True to the more cinematic qualities of the game, Telltale occasionally inflicts a traditional horror movie hero on us in the form of Lee.  The guy falls down more than once.  He has trouble reloading a weapon until it’s almost too late. And his narration when you examine something in-game is sometimes comically simplistic.

Of course, Lee isn’t the only one to deliver some eyebrow-raisers:

When talking to the 8 year-old girl (Clementine) he’s sworn to protect, Lee asks her how first grade is.  She replies “It’s easy.”  Which is understandable, since most first graders are six.

Yeah, I suppose first grade is pretty easy the third time around.

There is also a scene in which an otherwise normal-seeming woman is unable to determine that a radio doesn’t work because it has no batteries, and then thanks Lee for finding them by saying “I wouldn’t have known what to look for.”  Remember this the next time someone tries to sell you on homeschooling.

The Final Analysis:

Pros:

• Rich visuals
• Immersive play
• Real-time responses (with consequences)

Cons:

• Clunky interface (especially during combat)
• The game mostly involves observing consequences, not taking action
• The guy suffers from chronic horror-movie syndrome.  Or maybe just vertigo.

Overall, I’d recommend the game to any of my fellow zombie enthusiasts.  It looks great and the story is awesome.  Also, the end scene (at least, the one I saw) was an admirably bleak kick in the pants.  This game isn’t taking any prisoners, and I admire that. —BW