I recently played The Walking Dead game, and I enjoyed it enough to force Stevie to play it. I played it on iPad, but it’s also available on Xbox. The game takes place in during a zombie apocalypse. You play as Lee Everett, a convicted murderer (this is explained more in depth during the game), and you have to take care of an 8-year-old girl you find who has been hiding out alone. Gameplay is simple enough that anyone can pick it up. Basically, the bulk of it is making choices. You have to make tough moral decisions, which sometimes meaning picking who lives and dies. You choose whether to lie or tell the truth, threaten or reason. You’ll decide how you treat the girl, how you treat everyone else, whose side you take in arguments. Not only do these choices affect how the game goes (to an extent), but they also reveal a lot about you. It’s fun to compare with other players and see why they made certain choices. Interspersed with the decisions are story, some zombie shooting and smashing, and relatively simple puzzles. It’s enough to get your blood pumping and your mind active. The best feature of the game is a compelling story with excellent voice acting. You really get sucked in.

Now, I want to talk about some things in the game, so here’s a fair warning:

******** SPOILER TIME!!! ********

Carley or Doug? I picked Carley because she had a gun and knew how to use it. I thought that was the best skill. But I also thought Doug was brave and was sad I couldn’t save him. Stevie cracked me up when she said she picked Doug because Carley was too stupid to know how to put batteries in a radio. Most people picked Carley because she’s a hot chick with a gun. I wonder how things would change if certain attributes were switched. What if Doug was the attractive one and Carley wasn’t? What if their personalities were the same, but their genders were switched? I’m curious if that would change anything.

Consequences. When I looked online, I saw some disappointed at how the choices you make didn’t affect the game more. That is, you’re stuck to a fairly linear storyline. Some choices don’t have that big a consequence. It does detract from some of the replayability of the game, insofar as you already know what will happen. However, a lot of the decisions are moral ones, like choosing whether to take from the abandoned car or not. Often moral imperatives exist independent of the consequences. Not all decisions have to result in different gameplay for them to be fun or interesting. On a similar note, some people would’ve liked for there to be some type of consequences for your character when you make tough decisions, like deciding to kill Duck. Your character would get more stressed, and it’d build some type of meter. The reasoning is that when you are playing the game through, you can only imagine that making Kenny kill Duck would make him more likely to snap, while your character will never snap. I don’t like that as a possible mechanic since it makes it too game-like. The fun comes from making your decisions based on your relationships with the characters and how you’d really react.

Ben. I hated Ben so much. I dropped him from the tower. I was surprised at how many people decided to save him, considering that he was such a liability. Then again, I’m not sure I would’ve done it if he had begged me to live. I only wish I could’ve never found Larry’s medicine, that ass. (I told Mark that Larry was a racist, haha.) Ben caused the death of so many people. He fucked up at the Motor Inn and so basically caused the deaths of Duck and Katjaa. He also got Brie killed when he took that axe and nearly killed the rest of us. I also really hated him when he ran away from Clementine instead of trying to help her. In his defense, perhaps, he was just a kid, as Chuck and others noted. (I mean, now that I’m 25, I think it’s ridiculous that I considered myself an adult at 18.) But, come on, you need to man up, Ben. It’s a motherfucking zombie apocalypse; grow the fuck up. I also voted for him to get left behind even though Clem wanted him on the boat.