Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Spoiler Filled Discussion of The Walking Dead: Episode 3!

A thorough disclaimer: this SNS is going to be very, very spoiler ridden. It’s difficult to discuss The Walking Dead as a concept without spoilers: all of its various incarnations constitute experiences where things occur in such a way that you engage with them alongside with the characters. The story itself is less gripping than its unfolding. Sean Vanaman has done this every bit as adeptly as Robert Kirkman in the latest incarnation of The Walking Dead. If you want a line of copy about whether or not you should buy the game, that’s it. If you haven’t read the comics or played the game and you care about the experience being spoiled, please leave now.

Now, has everyone who wants to avoid spoilers gone? I’ll give you a minute.

We’re alone now? Good.

The latest incarnation of The Walking Dead takes the shape of the volumes of the comic books setin the prison, where the group begins to dissolve internally, hope begins to fade and the external threat of the living destroys everything the survivors hold dear. It’s a bleak narrative beat, exhausting to interact with, and Sean Vanaman delivers it perfectly, both through tense discussions where rationality is fast fading and unexpected, sporadic violence from characters who seemed fairly rational in previous episodes. It’s about the support system Lee has surrounded himself with disintegrating even as you do everything you can to keep it together. The choices you make in this episode do little to stem a tide of internal strife based not around the fallout from your own decisions, but from a mounting sense of fear and hopelessness which drives characters to act not in their best interest, but in a fashion which attempts to recodify their world view as right or correct.

It’s a staggering commentary on the human experience lensed through a seemingly silly narrative structure: a video game about zombies is exposing how and why people fail themselves in times of crisis and how we, as a species, have become incredibly good at convincing ourselves of things we know for a fact to be untrue. And it’s executed through some truly wrenching moments at points where you expect the tension to ratchet down. Following an escape sequence where you’re forced to snipe bandits and walkers alike in an effort to give your allies enough time to escape the motel you’ve been taking shelter in, there’s a conversation on the side of the road where nearly every character is shouting at Lilly, one of the aspiring leaders of the group, to stop her one woman witchhunt to uncover the identity of the supply thief. The answer is fairly obvious – the guilty party acts like a guilty party in the moment, and only later has the wherewithal to profess his innocence. Normally this would be a chance for you to win points by defending one character from another and talking the group out of a violent conflict.

But in Episode 3, the stakes are too high, the stresses too great. Instead of getting a nice downbeat moment where the members of the group get a chance to digest what has happened and discuss it rationally, Lilly pulls out a gun and shoots a character (in my case, Carley) in the head. While her back is turned. It’s a startling moment, one that calls into question just how suited to survival Lilly is. Her actions become increasingly uncharacteristic and irrational throughout the episode, and if you keep her around (which I did) you never get a chance to see it resolve: instead she vanishes into the sunset without really ever coming to terms with what she’s done, abandoning the group she ostensibly set out to protect.

This sets off a grueling cascade of events that leave your party, eight strong at the beginning of the episode, winnowed down to four haggard survivors, two of them wracked with guilt to the point that they’re barely functioning. In true Walking Dead form, replacement appear, but these replacements are unknown quantities. Can you trust the mysterious hobo? The nerdy civil war buff? Or the tough as nails lady who seems to be ready to be a mom right out of the gate? And given the bleak landscape, how long will the people you know be able to keep going?

These are the questions that episode 3 asks, unflinchingly, and they’re questions I wanted different answers to. I spent a solid portion of my time playing Episode 3 backtracking and attempting to find a way to save Carley by supporting her at every turn. I even tried to plant a seed of romance between Lee and her. When she died, I gasped and immediately felt the need to back away. But I couldn’t and, in that moment, I chose to keep Lilly around, to do whatever we could to keep the group in some way together.

Episode 3 isn’t about getting what you work for, or even what you deserve. It’s about salvaging what you can and learning to adjust. At present, most of the “good” characters, where “good” means competent and reasonable, are gone. And while that makes me want to shut down, the narrative causing these actions is compelling enough to keep me pressing on and doing what I can to make Ben and Kenny, two characters I have trouble relating to on any level, into individuals I can trust when the chips are down. I’m almost positive they’ll fall now, especially Kenny, who can barely speak after losing his son, but keeping him as long as I can is my priority now.

Episode 3 also tries some interesting bits with the structure of the game, raising the stakes and changing expectations by altering the mechanics and the functionality of the game. Previously there were no dream sequences in The Walking Dead, but in Episode 3 you’ll be treated to one, totally unexpectedly, following some pretty grueling revelations that will make it seem totally possible and just as heartbreaking and confusing as if it were real. And the dialogue updates about characters holding grudges or trusting or distrusting you more or less based on your responses will keep appearing right up until a character dies: you’ll hear that Carley will remember your support just before she’s shot in the head, so the mechanics, we learn, are no longer a marker of a character’s safety.

Unfortunately, for every mechanical twist there was a misstep. There are minor technical issues (and by minor, I mean characters not rendering during play and some terrible pathing, things that aren’t really that minor but aren’t game killers per-sec) but for the most part, the problems I had with the game came from the design choices in a handful of the puzzles. The shooting bits were a little finicky, but I’ll forgive them that – they’re abstracting the way that you shoot a gun, asking you to pick and choose targets, favoring stationary targets over mobile ones, fair enough. But one puzzle in the second half of the game changes the mechanics for interacting with objects and moving your character without warning, with a time sensitive element and a really low threshold for failure. I died four times in that puzzle, not because I couldn’t figure it out (the puzzle was to walk backwards, pick up a wrench and hit zombies in the face with it) but because the user interface and movement controls all changed in that situation, and thus the puzzle became an exercise in familiarizing myself with a new control set quickly, rather than an exercise in solving one of the wonderful murder-puzzles that The Walking Dead presents as cathartic action set pieces. Some design choices also make elements of the game hard to see and camera control challenging in the train centered portion of the episode. I was playing “hunt the pixel” rather than “figure out which environmental element is really useful” for part of the game.

But the story is so solid, and the twists so wrenching, that I don’t think anyone who even moderately enjoyed the first two episodes can skip this one. I’m not sure how the game will develop as time goes on, I can’t say it’ll be lighthearted or fun, but I will say this: Vanaman has captured exactly what makes the Walking Dead great, and deserves praise for it. He’s provided us with something that video games often lack, something we’ve stopped coming to expect from them nowadays to the point that we’ll often praise poorly constructed ones as grand gestures: he’s given us a story worth reading, and he’s done it without any pomp or circumstance. Well done, sir.