My finger hovers awkwardly over the keys. I can feel time ticking away, but all I can do is stare at the screen in disbelief. I panic and make a snap judgement. My character restrains his friend to allow one member of our group to brutally murder another. I tell myself it was the right call, but I remain unsure even as I type this sentence. Welcome to The Walking Dead.
The game opens with a standard zombie apocalypse setup (you know the score by now: don’t get bitten by reanimated corpses, remove the head or destroy the brain to dispatch), which sees the protagonist, Lee, waking up into a living nightmare after a car crash. He soon meets Clementine, a young girl, and responsibility for her welfare quickly falls upon the player. All of the hallmarks of the graphic novel it’s based on remain intact; it is never simply a story of overcoming horrific obstacles, but what overcoming those obstacles does to the humanity of those left alive. Don’t let the cartoonish art style fool you; this is a remarkably mature game, something that became apparent to me between swings two and three of the hammer which caved in the skull of Clementine’s zombified babysitter.
The Walking Dead allows the player to dramatically alter the course of their journey. Lee is presented with dialogue and action choices every few minutes. These affect things from merely the way characters react to Lee, all the way up to whether members of the group live or die.