Zombies are everywhere in media right now. Movies and video games featuring the undead are churned out every year, and one of the most popular shows currently on television is AMC's The Walking Dead. As a result, it's easy to get sick of seeing the same zombie hordes portrayed every which way possible in the quest for the almighty dollar. There's only so many times you can mow through a horde of shambling corpses with an M16, chainsaw, or even a teddy bear before it gets stale.
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| Leave it to Dead Rising to come up with this. |
Zombies are in some ways a programmer's dream. They don't need any sort of AI more complicated than 'run at and attack the player'. Therefore all the developer really needs to do is throw enough of them at you and/or make them hard enough to kill and there's the game's difficulty. It certainly seems easier than needing to program more complicated AI that may use cover or other mechanics. However zombie gaming doesn't always have to be just about killing hordes of brainless undead in silly or gory ways. In fact one of my favorite zombie games tried something very different from the norm.
Telltale
Telltale Games was formed in 2004 by former LucasArts employees following the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police. After a very slow start releasing licensed CSI games for Ubisoft, the studio was able to secure the rights to making more Sam & Max games. The games produced were very successful both critically and commercially and established Telltales' current pattern of episodic releases done in 'seasons'. Five episodes would be created per each season, to be released regularly over several months to a year. Following the success of Sam & Max they released several more successful licensed adventure games, including Tales of Monkey Island.
Having established themselves as creators of solid and fun adventure games, Telltale began acquiring licenses to well-known franchises outside gaming. Beginning with Jurassic Park and Back to the Future, Telltale also began to shift from being a comedy developer to focusing more seriously on dramatic storytelling. This first foray into dramatic storytelling for the studio went reasonably well. Back to the Future especially sold quite well, though critically the game was not as successful as some of their past ventures.
The Walking Dead
With plenty of recent successes, Telltale acquired licensing rights to The Walking Dead in 2012. Much like the television show - and unlike just about every other zombie video game released up to that point - Telltale focused heavily on characters rather than zombie slaying. Instead of fighting against zombie hordes, The Walking Dead portrayed a struggle to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world. And surviving was hard. Many characters you came to know and care about died suddenly and brutally. None of the characters were supersoldier killing machines, most of them weren't even soldiers period. They were just people who had managed to stay alive for just a few months longer than everyone else.
You played Lee, a man on his way to prison when the zombie outbreak began. After the car transporting him crashes, you meet a little girl named Clementine who quickly becomes the center of both Lee's and your world. She is the moral heart of the game as you struggle to keep her both sheltered and safe from the horror and brutality of the new world. Of course these two goals almost always come into conflict, with you being forced to show her far more violence and death than you probably want to. You really came to care for all the characters thanks to excellent writing and voice acting, but Clementine always stood out. The father-daughter relationship that formed between you as Lee and Clem is apparent almost from the very beginning, but that's the point. The two characters slide into the roles so naturally and believably that new characters you meet almost always assume they're father and daughter immediately.
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| What you say always feels like it matters, even if it really doesn't. |
The game resonated with people like no other game Telltale had made before, leading it to sell more than 20 million episodes (I was unable to find sales data for the sales of the season as a whole). It also garnered multiple storytelling, character, and game of the year awards. It is by far Telltale's largest and most successful game, and its success is based entirely on its writing and characters - a far cry from the typical selling points of a zombie game. It's hardly the first time zombies have been used to examine the human condition, but it was the first time it was explored in such a way in video games.
The Walking Dead is hardly perfect however, and barely qualifies as a game so much as an interactive novel of sorts. Gameplay is simple and poses very little challenge at any point - combat is typically simple quick-time events and puzzles are almost always basic and obvious. Even the choices you make as Lee matter little in the grand scheme of the game, rarely changing anything in the narrative. The writers have a story they want to tell, and they're going to tell it regardless of your reaction to a particular scene. These same problems have unfortunately continued into the second season, with little to no effort made to improve them. While a shame, if that's the price of such excellent drama and character depth, I know I'll happily pay it.
