Review: Walking Dead Season 2

After a long year of waiting, the fifth and finale episode of The Walking Dead Season 2 came out last week. Following the stellar success of the first season, expectations were high for the latest five-episode series.

The first episode finds ten-year-old Clementine making her way north to Wellington, a rumored safe haven in a world ravaged by hordes of the undead. Along the way, she meets a new group of survivors who are on the run from their former leader, Carver.

Though this season rarely reaches the narrative peaks of the first season, a very well-written story keeps you invested through the episodes.

Perhaps the weakest point of Season 2 were the characters. As the action quickly begins to escalate, we don’t get much time to learn more about the new people we’ve met before they start dying off left and right.

It’s not all bad though. There are a few really engaging new characters that you end up feeling a connection with and Clementine’s relationship with long-time companion Kenny really drives the story forward.

The main antagonist, Carver, is definitely one of the more memorable new characters. Voiced by Michael Madsen, Carver rules over a community living in a fortified hardware store where failure is brutally punished.

The people who have known him in the past often make excuses for his violent actions, saying he was once a good man. This ties in well with the recurring themes of the series and sets up some interesting parallels with later conflicts in the story.

On the other hand, much of the supporting cast blends into the background. Some of the new survivors are so one-dimensional that I have trouble finding more than a single adjective to describe their personalities.

In the season finale, there is a moment where you need to choose between two groups. It was then that I realized that one team was comprised entirely of characters that I either didn’t care about or outright disliked. In a series that is known for its hard choices, this is a failure of storytelling.

The action sequences this season have their highs and lows. Aside from a couple standout scenes, the action fails to establish much tension and mostly consists of aiming the cursor at zombie heads and pulling the trigger. Fortunately, this season completely avoids the arcade shooting sections of Season 1.

With this season, Telltale has basically given up on the point-and-click exploration and puzzle-solving segments. This change, which allows the game to keep its focus on story, is a definite improvement.

Choice has always been at the heart of the series. Throughout each episode, the player must make several difficult moral choices which affect how the story progresses.

Season 1 has been criticized for only offering the illusion of choice. The story played out the same, more or less, regardless of the choices you made. Season 2 avoids this shortcoming by offering five distinct endings based on the choices made in the finale.

Some of the endings are more satisfying than others, but each brings this chapter to a close effectively. The multiple endings give the player a greater sense of involvement in the story and add even more replayability to this season. Of course, it would have been even better if choices made earlier in the season also played a part in that conclusion.

Season 2’s storytelling doesn’t quite live up to the example of Season 1, but this latest installment does take a few steps in the right direction for future titles. It offers a few improvements to the familiar Telltale formula while also giving us another great interactive experience.

8 out of 10

Seasons 1 and 2 of The Walking Dead game are available on Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, PC,and iOS.

The New Age of Adventure Games?

In the 1990s, one of the most popular computer game genres was the point-and-click adventure. The decade saw classic titles such as the Monkey Island franchise, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Myst, and many others. Since then, very few exceptional adventure games have been made and  the genre has fallen out of style with most developers and gamers.

With the success of The Walking Dead game last year and some promising titles on the horizon, we may be looking at a resurgence of adventure games into the mainstream.

Back From the Dead

One of the modern champions of the genre is Telltale Games. Their early games, based on licensed properties like Monkey Island and Sam & Max, appealed to a niche audience of adventure fans. That changed when they released the first season of The Walking Dead game last year in April.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead eschews the often complicated and sometimes absurd puzzle-solving of the traditional adventure game for a character-driven narrative full of tough moral choices. Though the episodic series features some pretty shaky action sequences and some other technical problems, The Walking Dead delivers a great story and memorable characters that stick with you.

According to VGChartz, The Walking Dead game sold more than 8.5 million units by January 2013 (this includes each episode sold as a unit).

The critically acclaimed game was the first of Telltale’s games to gain widespread popularity, but it wasn’t just successful with gamers and fans of the comic books. For example, I was surprised when I got into a conversation last year with my upstairs neighbor, a college-age non-gamer girl, about an intense scene in Episode 2 of the series. Both of us made the same choice to not kill a certain character.

The game’s mainstream success introduced many new casual gamers to the adventure genre, so I think it’s safe to say that The Walking Dead game has set the stage for a new wave of adventure games.

Double Fine’s Crowdfunding Success

Tim Schafer is one of the biggest names in adventure games, working as a writer, director, and programmer on classic titles such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle. After leaving LucasArts, he started his own company called Double Fine Productions and branched out into other genres with games like Psychonauts and Iron Brigade. Their latest adventure game, Ron Gilbert’s The Cave, was met with mixed reviews earlier this year.

Last February, a project called Double Fine Adventure appeared on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The campaign raised $3.3 million dollars from more than 80,000 people. The title of the game being funded, Broken Age, was later announced.

Broken Age follows the lives of two children, tentatively named Sacrifice Girl and Space Boy,  whose coming-of-age stories are somehow connected across time and space. It will have traditional point-and-click adventure mechanics and rely on intuitive puzzles rather than action to engage players.

What’s Next From Telltale

Telltale is following up The Walking Dead game with  another graphic novel adaption. Telltale first announced they would be working on a game based on the popular Fables comic book series back in 2011. After posting a tweet that simply read “#howl” in March, Telltale later confirmed that their next game would be a Fables game called “The Wolf Among Us.” It is scheduled to release later this year.

In the world of Fables, the characters from classic fairy tales have been forced from their homeland and now live in a community in  New York City called Fabletown. The game will star Bigby Wolf, the formidable sheriff of the Fabletown, as he investigates a murder.

According to GameInformer, the game will have a lot in common with The Walking Dead game. It will be an episodic story with moral decisions that affect gameplay and a strong narrative based on relationships between characters. These similarities will most likely attract fans of The Walking Dead game as well as fans of Fables, bringing a wider audience to the adventure genre.

If Broken Age and The Wolf Among Us are as successful as The Walking Dead, other developers will likely try their hand at the adventure genre, for better or worse. If things go well, the genre might finally make its comeback.