Part of that connection comes from excellent writing from the Telltale staff that manages to be funny, tense and scary at the right moments, amazing voice acting from Lee and Clementine, and a visual style that’s pulled from the comic book world the game is set in and that never manages to get boring. The relationships I’ve built, the emotions I’ve felt, the choices I’ve made – that’s what makes The Walking Dead: The Game so endearing. The Walking Dead: The Game is like a coloring book: we each have the same black and white sketch, but it’s up to us to fill it in as we see fit. I’ve heard some naysayers refer to this as “the illusion of choice” - as in what we’re doing or saying really doesn’t matter because it all nets out relatively the same - but that’s selling the journey short. The Walking Dead: The Game is telling us the same story and thus taking us to the same conclusion, but it allows us to experience it in different ways. Will our endings be completely different? No. When you get to Episode 5, the things you have and haven’t done – the choices you haven’t thought about since Episode 1 – are going to come up. The decisions you’re making in the moment have ripples that go throughout the entire adventure. I might shoot my mouth off in anger, but you might keep your cool either way, the group will remember that and the dynamic will change. I might choose to befriend someone you hate, and you might choose to leave someone I took. You and I are tasked with the same goal of protecting Clem, but the way we do it might be completely different. This is what makes The Walking Dead so special. In The Walking Dead, you choose, and the game moves on – adapting its story to each decision. Whereas previous adventure games from developer Telltale Games would let you run through every possible line of dialogue, that isn’t the case here. Choices and dialogue pop up on screen with timers, and you have seconds to pick exactly what you’re going to do or say.

Sure, you’ll need to figure out how to get a radio working and how to distract walkers here and there, but the real draw here is a “choose your own adventure.” As you play through the five episodes, the big moments come when you choose how Lee responds to situations and what he says in conversations with his fellow survivors. See, The Walking Dead is an adventure game, but it’s not the kind of adventure game you’ve come to expect. “It is these two goals that make The Walking Dead: The Game the juggernaut that it is.

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