It’s taken me almost a month to play through the most recent
episode of The Walking Dead. There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost, my lack of internet for
three god damn weeks. That was a pain in
the ass, something I’m still adjusting to here.
Thank god I got my internet set up before Sandy hit, otherwise it would’ve
been a long, rough storm for me. But the
other, far more honest issue keeping me from playing The Walking Dead is the raw emotional and mental focus that it
takes for me to sit and play it for a while.
At this point, I have the same relationship with the game
that I have with the comics more or less.
I enjoy it tremendously, but every time I sit down and start digging
into it, I just wait for something terrible to happen. If I like a character, especially in light of
episode 3’s appallingly effective cat scare, I expect them to die quite
terribly and suddenly. If I have work to
do or commitments on the horizon, I’m not going to sit down and start playing The Walking Dead. I don’t want to lose control of my
experience, and I don’t want to risk unsettlingly my already delicate mental
state when someone else will have to deal with the fallout.
So even though I’ve been able to play Episode 4 for almost
three weeks now, I just finished it two days ago. I’ve barely had time to adjust to it, but
before the spoilers begin I’ll say that it delivers on the same sort of “anything
can happen” promise that exists within The
Walking Dead comics in spades without treading at all over familiar
ground. And now the spoilers begin.
There are occasions where that familiar ground begins to
emerge, in the first quarter of the episode when references to a Social
Darwinist society emerge and a settlement called Crawford is upheld as an
example of how terrible humanity can be.
And while it does seem pretty terrible once you get a chance to see how
it was, it’s nothing compared to the terror that The Governor presents in the
comics. There are no promises of gang
rape or brutal gladiator cultures. No
one loses a hand. But there is a horror
and an inhumanity present that makes the rage my new favorite character (Molly,
the rock climbing ninja) expresses totally associable, and an exploitation and
slow burning terror beneath the settlement that makes them truly
revolting. Their fate, however, is
horrible as well, and it presses Lee and his band of survivors through a
similar set of terrible trials. There
are ample opportunities to follow the example set by Crawford, but each twist
is truly unexpected, and the message inherent in Crawford’s terrible state as
well as your movement through it is effectively delivered, if more heavy handed
than most of The Walking Dead’s
social commentary.
And if you say you saw what happens in Crawford coming, you’re
full of shit (spare perhaps the revelation that someone had a previous relationship
with Crawford). It’s a beautiful moment
of betrayed tension which leads into one of the more pleasantly conventional
adventure game segments that I’ve experienced in recent memory.
But it’s set among a series of events that are grueling in
every way. Each time I see a puzzle, my
stomach ties itself in knots. I wonder
if I’ll be killing someone or leaving someone to die in some horrible Sophie’s
choice moment. These moments are less
common now than they have been, but there’s much to be said for their impact as
each one hits in turn. It breeds in me
a kind of horrible fatalism, a trait grown by demand, where I have to separate
my emotional connection from these characters and simply put myself in Lee’s
shoes. What can I do in this
scenario? How can I help the most people
in the best way? How can I insure that
Clementine is safe? How can I survive?
This last question becomes a non-issue late in the game, and
I’m incredibly unsure of where the series is heading in Episode 5 because of
the last ten minutes of the game. I assume I’ll still be playing Lee but, and
this is a huge spoiler alert, so if you haven’t played the game and plan to
stop reading now, playing a character who has been bitten seems like a terribly
strange thing to do. A character who is
literally walking towards his death and trying to set his affairs in order is a
strange beast, and while I trust Telltale and Skybound to treat the matter with
appropriate gravity and glibness in turn, I am still very unsure of how I’ll
respond to it because holy shit, Lee’s been bitten and his fate is sealed. As is the way of these things, it happens
suddenly and stupidly in a moment you can see coming, but it’s no less
startling for it. They’re demanding that
you play a dying character in the final episode, a dying character in a dying
world filled with life (I’m almost positive Christa is pregnant) who is trying
to preserve the future as best he can.
Or not, I don’t know how other people have been playing Lee.
All of this horror and fatalism emerges with a Lee who has become
startlingly good at killing. The first
episode’s tense, nerve wracking kills have been replaced by a smooth, slick
stream of killing moments where Lee rips his way through a handful of walkers
with ease, slips in behind packs of them while they’re distracted and butchers
them and mows them down in hallways without missing a shot. Paired with Molly’s balletic capacity for
murder and Chuck’s ill fated by brazen defense of the group early in the game,
it makes me wonder what Lee will do to Walkers in the fifth episode, now that
he has nothing to lose. Perhaps he’ll
grow into a sort of even more fearless and far more paternal Tyrone from the
comics. It remains to be seen.
But it makes for a very different kind of game. I don’t know if it’s a real development or if
it’s simply my new attitude towards playing the game, which has come with
playing it with constant nerves on edge, but the whole thing is much more fluid
and logical than it has been in the past, and the killing is a mechanical chore
rather than a horrible exception to conversation. It is satisfying to clear out walkers instead
of worrying about ruffling Kenny’s feathers.
It is also, in a sense, exhausting, because every walker that keeps
coming demands attention and promises to harm someone I love. I am no longer concerned for Lee’s well
being, for reasons I’ve stated earlier.
But I am ravenous to see how his story will end. His bite doesn’t look that bad. Could he survive? Maybe it’s just a graze. But it’s never just a graze, is it? Better to think of Lee as a dead man walking
and to be fearless. Clementine’s future
is all that matters now. These are the
things I believe, the things burning in my mind. This is the capacity that The Walking Dead has, the truly
impressive ability to make me care about, identify with and develop a character
in a way that no RPG has managed to make me do…ever. In gaming history, I’ve never actually
developed a character the way I’ve developed Lee. Because you see, Lee Everett is a good
man. He’s going to do right if it’s the
last thing he does. Whatever the
cost. That’s the way I’ve been playing
him, the way I’ve been able to play him throughout the game. And that’s how he’s going to die. Getting Clementine back, making sure she’s
safe, whatever the cost.
The only thing I’ll say against episode 4, and the subject
of next week’s SNS, will be about releasing tracking statistics of other people’s
play habits and, in the case of The
Walking Dead, presenting them to players whether they want to see them or
not. Spoiler alert: I’m not crazy about
it, but that’s not the whole story.
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