The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day Review

Coming from Telltale, those who brought us family friendly fares such as Back to the Future and the newest Monkey Island outings, Tales, go a bit off their normal path here to bring us The Walking Dead, based on the comic books and not the TV show. A more mature adventure game, it is heavy on swearing, blood, and of course, zombies. Whether it’s better than their last tie-in effort, Jurassic Park is another question entirely. Read on to see how it does.

To begin with, it’s not like your average adventure game. On the other hand, it’s also not like your typical game involving hordes of zombies: the game is very story focused and heavy on character development and background. For lack of a better term, it’s rather tame in the gameplay department, but this surprisingly helps more than it hinders. It’s slightly different to your average point and click game, in that you move your main character, Lee, directly with WASD, and also move a cursor around the screen with your mouse, selecting items and people to interact with.

The story begins with Lee in the back of a police car having a conversation with a strangely polite policeman. After the briefest of introductions to our hero (we don’t actually find out why he is in the police car), there’s an accident and things kick off as you would expect to happen in a zombie infested land. From there you meet a little girl, Clementine, as you search a nearby house for help, and you take her under your wing to protect her whilst also looking for other survivors and trying to stay alive. Giving you small pieces of backstory on characters as you go is integral to making you want to progress; an adventure games biggest strengths should lie in its puzzles and its story, and the story certainly gets off to a good start here.

Graphically, it’s as one might expect from a comic book translation, with strong black lines detailing facial features and such; it brings the page to life in a way that doesn’t make light of the games serious setting and characters. Having not read it myself, a quick bit of research shows the comics are actually black and white; the game on the other hand is very colourful (during the day). It fits the mood perfectly and characters have, while perhaps a little over the top sometimes, believable expressions and movements. This styled aesthetic means ageing won’t be a problem; and while it’s not the best cell-shaded effort in history, it certainly holds its own.

One thing worth noting when playing on the PC, is that if you are using an AMD graphics card, shadows will have to be turned to low settings. If they are set to high, regardless of whether your machine can handle it or not, you’ll get horrible stuttering and flat-out freezing when camera angles change in cut-scenes. Hopefully this will be patched quickly as low settings on shadows tend to make them look like a blur of different shades of black.

Your time will mostly be spent looking around and conversing with other characters, with very little time actually given to killing zombies; the way it should be. You aren’t a one man army, here. You don’t have lots of guns and ammo; you’re a guy with a little girl to protect, and when you do kill any zombies, it’s rather gruesome and innovated as you go, as opposed to whipping out your favourite gun and aiming for the head, therefore making it a refreshing change of pace given all the zombie-shooting titles over the last few years. The conversations themselves are a big driving point here, with each new dialogue revealing something about yourself, or one of your fellow survivors, and the voice actors themselves keep things rolling, with each one giving good performances.

Speaking of your fellow survivors, there will be times where you have to save one, or another. The game refers to these as ‘difficult decisions,’ and they are just that. It’s not just some faceless survivors here, a’la Dead Rising; these are people you’ve spent time getting to know and maybe even like, and to have to choose one will be a decision you’ll have to live with, and one you may regret later. Characters also remember how you treat them, with the game informing you if someone respects your honestly with them, or they remember if you get snippy with them or treat them like dirt. While it remains to be seen how this affects things in the first chapter, it will be interesting to see how these small decisions affect things in later chapters.

The series, which will comprise of five parts, is off to a fantastic start here, introducing some characters and their backstories, letting you know you will be making some tough choices ahead, and more importantly, keeping a good story rolling throughout the experience, which you can finish in around 2-3 hours if it hooks you enough to complete it in one sitting, which it may just do. I certainly can’t wait to get started on part 2, and this can surely only mean Telltale are doing their job well.