Telltale Games making a mark on graphics adventure games thanks to The Walking Dead

How are we doing with Zombie apocalypses? Surely at some point at the beginning of the last decade you were tired of seeing all kinds of projects and products following the classic formula of "the world went to hell and now there are human-eating monsters everywhere" it was a scenario that many authors used to tell their stories but already in 2003 one of the best proposals of the genre had been published, one that did not focus too much on how the dead would impact the world but on how it would affect human relationships, we focused much more on how people would react to the conditions of life from the arrival of the zombies, in black and white comic by the hand of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore came The Walking Dead.

After the comic book, several years pass before AMC proposes to Kirkman and Moore to make a TV show with one of the highest budgets in TV, the show becomes a success and attracts several looks, including Telltale Games, a former division of Lucasarts that had been making adventure games for some years with moderate success but with the weight of one of the most watched and successful TV shows in history would have the perfect catapult to push a groundbreaking game in the market while bringing mechanics never before seen or developed in the world of video games. Telltale Games in 2012 released The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series with a limited budget but enough to give life to all the ideas of Sean Vanaman's team who wanted to hold on to the style of Robert Kirkman's comic while delivering a mature and quality story in the style of "Point-&-Click" adventure games like Maniac Mansion or Grim Fandango (previous review), some simple but effective exploration elements and added a new variant to the formula, we could decide "our path" in the story by giving us a mechanic in which we could choose the dialogues and actions of our character.

A key difference of this game with other adventure games is that it renounces to focus on the puzzles as the center of the experience, to replace this idea a mechanic where the story of the characters in conjunction with the exploration and decision making of our protagonist take the center of attention, the decisions in this game take a much greater meaning as there may be times when we must decide whether a character should die or decide in drastic moments of the adventure, the interpretations as well as the script throughout the game help a lot to make the story shine and become the center of the experience, another thing to clarify is the format of the game, as similar to a comic book or a television series, the game is divided into chapters that are leaving periodically and in which our decisions are transferred from one chapter to another, thus increasing the importance of the paths we take and our immersion in the game and the characters.

Speaking of the characters, this game does a phenomenal job with the writing and its protagonists, quickly summarizing throughout the game we are Lee Everett who finds himself in the middle of a zombie outbreak in which he must survive with a group of people and above all must protect and guide the young Clementine (probably the best character in the entire saga) who is a young girl without parents who is rescued by Lee and who is our emotional and moral bond in the game, hence a question arises: knowing that we are caring for and guiding Clementine. What choices will we make? Will we be cruel or will we prove ourselves noble in this world destroyed by both the dead and the living? The game has a very interesting mechanic that notifies us in each option we choose if any character we talk to "remembers that" we told him, changing the course of the story (or at least the dialogues) and in the case of Clementine goes much further .... But I won't go into spoilers in this review. What I can say is that the story is a masterpiece, looking ahead of other productions in the industry and even rivaling many productions outside of video games.

The ambience of TellTale is another point to deal with that I love about this saga of games, the world of Kirkman in the comics is very well represented in the style of graphics of the game and is enhanced over the years to reach its version more attached to the comics in 2019, the character models while simple comply with basic actions that help us give context to the excellent vocal performances (I highlight Dave Fennoy as Lee and Melissa Hutchison as Clementine) that are the cornerstone along with the script that leads us straight into the abyss on many occasions and where they let us know in each episode that no character is safe.

Needless to say that the game had a devastating reception as it entered at the right time when youtubers and streamers were starting to go viral on the web, the video game was starting to see a new beginning from the hand of , beating several records and winning several awards for game of the year, and I also think it goes without saying that Telltale then relied on its mechanics and that led to a surprising break, although I must say that this saga of games is untouchable from my point of view, has flaws when it comes to update its graphics or innovate in its gameplay in each installment but the story they tell us is, today, one of the best in the video game.

I have not played too many adventures like The Walking Dead and I know Telltale has a vast catalog of games but this story touched my heart and I consider it one of the best I've played, the exploration is just there, it does not contribute too much but does not hinder the rest which is excellent, I would play it again just to modify the decisions I made in the first game and I highly recommend it for those who are starting in the world of video games and want something simple to start with