Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Waking the Walking Dead!

There’s a degree to which artifice saturates games: designers often make them “gamey” to such an extent that it calls attention to itself. Interactivity, instead of being a driving concept that guides development, becomes a sort of burden. If you don’t make a game clicky enough, if you don't insert little nicknacks for players to collect, even if those clicks and nicknacks are meaningless, it isn’t really a game.

Crysis 2, for example, has pointless collectibles and radios that tell bits of unconnected story in it. These elements have fuck all to do with the rest of the game, but they’re there, and if you miss them you’ll feel like you’re missing out. The collectibles are a big enough deal that the game deigns to inform you, whenever you check your objectives, just how many things you still have to find if you want to find everything. But in the end, all these collectibles do is give you access to a tiny, blurry screenshot of something you’ll see in the game anyway, stripped of context.

These elements don’t accomplish anything in terms of gameplay, nor do they alter the course of the game. They’re just there to remind us that we’re in a game. If anything they simply serve as a barrier to immersion, one shoehorned in ex-post facto by designers. Achievements are, in a sense, part of the same issue (though they speak to a much more fundamental psychological response that man sociological theorists frequently raise with regard to games). I’m bringing this up because I wanted to talk about the recent Walking Dead game, and this seemed like a good way to do it. Because The Walking Dead adventure game, designed by Telltale Games with the blessing of Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, doesn’t have any of this.

It’s a game entirely focused around clicking on things, but there isn’t a single click that feels forced or out of place. Even the red herrings feel like a necessity, a part of making the game world a living thing rather than an act of gaming artifice. I turned on a TV four times wondering if something would happen and, in the end, realized I was just discovering the mechanic of the remote control in the game, a relatively insignificant element in the game.

Maybe it’s because of my recent foray into discussing, at greater than necessary length, the operational concepts behind structuralism in games, but I was really taken by the raw efficiency and dedication to economizing clicks that Telltale brought to bear on The Walking Dead. Because while it doesn’t feel like any clicks are out of place, it also doesn’t feel like the clicks are shoehorning me into a particular course of action, even though they obviously are. Telltale has a gentle hand with their design and they utilize it spectacularly, balancing logical potential actions by providing players with plenty of insignificant drawers to look through and plenty of visual cues, if they want them, that they can use to this end.

The end result is a decidedly old school adventure game with lots of new school design savvy and awesome flavor. And it works, really, on two levels: a level of traditional engagement and a level of more unconventional player insertion in developing the content of the game. Because the choices you make in The Walking Dead matter.

I’m not saying they matter in the Mass Effect “you get a slightly different dialogue” way. I’m saying that, in the short, sweet vignettes that populate The Walking Dead’s gameplay, the choices you make range from the dire and dramatic to the stealthily impactful. Let me explain what I mean after breaking the two operational levels of The Walking Dead down explicitly.


I - The Conventional Point and Click Adventure Level

Point and click adventures, venerable genre that they are, have a certain glorious economy to them when they’re well executed. They should be possessed of innocuous, important items you use to solve puzzles in unexpected ways, conspicuous important items that you use to solve puzzles in expected ways and there should never, ever, ever be fail states, ever. You should never put your player in a situation they can’t get out of. This was something that older, bigger, rougher adventure games didn’t quite get and, until the genre hit this beat, I’d contend that it didn’t quite recognize its own potential.

The Walking Dead operates solidly within this tradition, dramatically oscillating pace and providing players with puzzles of varying degrees of obviousness. It uses time in an unconventional way: many of the puzzles you’ll be asked to solve will have a ticking clock as represented by a zombie, and if you fail to deal with this ticking clock you’ll be treated to a brief, satisfying aside where your character is eaten alive by said zed.

Most of these puzzles are fairly simple: kick the zombie in the face, find the ammo on the ground and load the shotgun. That sort of thing. But the centerpiece of the game’s first chapter, which I can only describe as a large scale MacGuyver-zombie-murder-puzzle, plays with the concept of time brilliantly. For the most part, it’s a non-issue. But should you linger too long while peeking over a wall or a car you’ll draw the ire of the Dead. And if you hesitate for even a moment when you’re engaged in resolving what I can only refer to as “murder puzzles,” turning points where you’re asked to provide some final resolution to the mini-story that is a zombie’s life, you’re going to find yourself with your guts for garters. But if you pay attention, stay calm and think your actions before you get into them, through, you’ll get through the murder puzzles okay. And there are few things more satisfying than clearing out a motel parking lot with the errata of garbage you can find within it.

Of course, these set pieces are all situated in a series of no-fail states, which can kind of make the zombocalypse lame. I mean, if failure has no real consequences, how do you introduce the concept of stakes in a zombie game? Don’t sweat it, The Walking Dead has it covered.

II - The Dialogue Based Adventure Game

Because if you read the ad-copy for The Walking Dead game (and you should, it’s more honest than most) you’ll see that it mentions that there are enduring consequences for your actions. How can this be in a game with no fail states? Well, here’s the thing. The Walking Dead isn’t just about the conventional object collection and utilization puzzles that make up traditional puzzle games. It also brings in a strange new construct: the conversation puzzle.

These aren’t puzzles in the conventional no-fail, single solution sense. Rather these “puzzles” are essentially moments for you to fuck up or win points with other characters, essentially a means by which you can construct a narrative. And this narrative then spills into the game play itself. Certain puzzles or events are impacted by the decisions you make in dialogue. Characters come to trust you or distrust you based on your choices. And if someone doesn’t trust you at a key moment, something can go wrong. Or, if someone does trust you, something can go right when it shouldn’t have.

This is pretty mild as far as consequences go, I’ll admit, but its subtle development and surprisingly far reaching impact is pretty interesting, and the way that minute decisions snowball into bigger and bigger events strikes me as something that The Walking Dead will play on more heavily in chapters to come. And the fact that these conversation choices bleed into the puzzles themselves, changing the play of the game and the way that characters interact is something special, something I want to explore with multiple playthroughs of the game that, frankly, I just haven’t had time for.

And there are more severe consequences at work in The Walking Dead, though they’re not nearly as subtly executed and in the moment that they occur, might actually seem kind of facile. Because The Walking Dead, with moderately paced regularity, will ask you to make a choice between two characters, both of whom are in immediate danger. Based on your choice, one will live and one will die.

It’s usually pretty cut and dry - one early event asks you to choose between saving a child and saving an adult who, to the best of my knowledge, dies in the canon of The Walking Dead anyway. But sometimes the decisions are tougher. Do you save the savvy, intelligent, tubby nerd? Or do you save the dangerous, depressed, svelte former newscaster turned marksman? Both of them have useful skill sets, both of them are, in their interactions with you, good people. But you only have time to save one of them.

Paired with the dialogue, this infuses the game with a sense of constant stakes. Your mislaid word might drive a wedge between you and a useful asset. Your choice to save a character might get you thrown out of the place you’re staying when another character dies. If you lie, even accidentally or innocuously, people will turn cold towards you. They’ll get angry, stop trusting you. If they stop trusting you, you won’t be able to count on them when the chips are down.

It’s tough to discuss the impact of these choices without getting into spoilers. The choices themselves are straightforward, and you’ll know what the immediate outcome will be, for the most part, when you run into a given choice. But the enduring impact of your decisions is more difficult to perceive, and I wouldn’t want to ruin the twists for anyone reading this who plans to play The Walking Dead. The unexpected twists here, by the way, are pretty hot. Sean Vanaman, the game’s writer, has been pretty loyal to Kirkman in that regard. The plot isn’t particularly convoluted, and many of the “twists” are telegraphed, but “holy shit” moments still abound, and certain actions carry with them a mounting dread that can pervade the events surrounding them, even though they’re not directly connected with the dialogue and plot.

If I keep talking about it I’m going to let a great example slip, and I’d rather not. Telltale has made something incredible here, something that deserves to be experienced. They’ve proven many a time that they’re masters of the tropes at work in the adventure genre, and here they’ve refined that mastery to a level of exactitude that is essentially invisible: they’ve made an object so polished that the elements drawn from genre are no longer visible. And while their insertion of consequence into this context does show some pretty clear seams, it feels pedantic to criticize them for it. Because what they’ve done is introduce consequence to a genre which often divested itself uncomfortably from the very concept of enduring impact by adding things like partial successes and acceptable failures to the bipolar, antiseptic gaming experience we’re more familiar with.

The end result is a vibrant artifact, both loyal to its source material and gaming precedents and revolutionary in the approaches that it takes. If you like The Walking Dead comics you’ll like this game. If you adventure games, especially Telltale’s adventure games, you’ll like this game. And if you’re anything like me you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see the intellectual contributions that Telltale has made to the story of The Walking Dead and the tradition of adventure games as a whole.