Girl Gamer

Episode One: A New Day

Despite a couple cameos of familiar characters, The Walking Dead takes place outside the usual circle of characters. As a point-and-click adventure, fast reflexes and the ability to make tough moral decisions quickly are the key to survival. There are no clearly right or wrong answers, but the choices you make determine the outcome of your story. Confrontations with Walkers are always tense and swear-worthy events, complete with frantic clicking of the mouse and strong words of (ahemm) encouragement directed at the screen.

Your objective is simply to survive. How you do that is up to you, but this is no Left 4 Dead. You are a normal person surrounded by normal people in a scenario that is as realistic as it gets.

After Lee wakes from his ordeal, he learns the hard way what’s going on. After a stressful encounter with your first Walker, you must find help and it comes from a surprising source – a little girl named Clementine. Her parents were out of town when the outbreak occurred and her fate is placed in your hands. Along your point and click adventure, you’ll encounter other survivors and must make decisions; some of these are simple, others not so much. How much you converse and share with those characters will influence how they react to you, so the game is a dynamic, ever-changing thing with moderately high replay value.

As with all point and click adventures, the pace may be much slower than what you’re used to. If you imagined a fast-paced, shoot 'em up, running for your lives adventure with zombies, you will surely be disappointed. However, if you remember that this is in a character-driven, graphic novel-inspired story, then you can go with the flow and enjoy it for what it is.

The sound is really well done and the voice actors were cast wonderfully. The game was in development before Season One of the TV show, so the familiar characters do not share the same actors. However, the ones they chose did a fine job.

I really enjoy the art style, which puts you right inside the graphic novel. Similar to the style of Borderlands, the hand-drawn look is smooth, but does not take anything away from the grittiness of this tale.

Overall, The Walking Dead is shaping up to be an enjoyable and different kind of zombie game experience. Although picking up the controls can be stressful at first, especially when a Walker is on your neck, a bit of practice will get you back on top and instill more confidence.