Do You Have What It Takes To Survive? – Telltale’s Walking Dead Season 1

It’s October! It’s time to shut the lights and play some horror games, this month we’ll be looking at some classic Horror games, starting with Telltale’s Game of the Year winning The Walking Dead – Season 1.

SPOILERS – I do my best to avoid HUGE plot spoilers, but obviously some information will be given away.

The Walking Dead : Season 1 is the story of Zombie Apocalypse survivor Lee Everett’s journey from incarceration to redemption, and the path that he had to take to get there. Your role as the player is to help Lee make his choices, keeping in mind that every decision you make could very well save someone closest to you, or be responsible for their death.

Our journey starts out with Lee crashing in the woods after the police car he is in careens off the road and flips. Fighting off the first sign of a zombie epidemic he finds, he meets up with a young girl who is hiding from her old babysitter (who of course is a zombie) and waiting for her parents to come and find her. Lee, being the upstanding citizen that he is, takes Clementine under his wing, promising to try and reunite her with her family. This begins the journey of life, death, and a whole lot of discovery to come.

Clementine and Lee are never apart for long from this point on, and battle a slew of enemies. From the zombies themselves, to the untrustworthy cannibals, and the maniac who wants Clementine all to himself, their journey is fraught with danger.

Along the way, they meet quite a few close friends like Kenny and Glenn (Yes that Glenn, the one we all know and love), but also lose a few of them based on the decisions you will be making in the game.

The decisions you make in this game will directly impact the survival of your group, the attitude they will have towards you, and even whether or not they will take your side in the decisions you try to make for the group. This is literally a graphic version of those choose your own adventure books from the 1990’s.

As the story progresses, we fall deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, causing us to start questioning our own life choices. Is it right to sacrifice one man for another? Is it okay to help someone commit suicide if there is a chance they may be sick enough to wipe out our group? Do people really taste like chicken, or is that just a way for a family of cannibals to justify their eating habits? All of these things and more we learn in the play through of this game, and I can honestly say, I enjoyed every pain staking minute of it.

Graphically stunning, voice acting is superb, the overall feel is what we want for a Walking Dead production, and in my opinion, this is a must have game for any fans of the Telltale story arcs, or of the zombie genre in general. It will leave you wanting more, and next week, I will do a review on the more. 400 days (an extra bonus episode for season 1) goes a bit deeper into the story we love, following the aftermath of the first season.

In my honest opinion, Telltale games knocked this one completely out of the park.