Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Matter of Choice in The Walking Dead Games


SPOILER ALERT!! THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS FROM THE WALKING DEAD GAME SEASONS ONE AND TWO. BUT I’M GUESSING IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THEM BY NOW THEN YOU REALLY HAVE NO INTENTIONS OF EVER DOING SO AND YOU MAY NOT EVEN CARE WHAT I HAVE TO SAY. REGARDLESS, IF YOU PLAN ON PLAYING THESE GAMES, DON’T READ THE FOLLOWING BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO SPOIL THE CRAP OUT OF EVERYTHING AND YOU ONLY HAVE YOURSELF TO BLAME FOR NOT TAKING FIVE SECONDS TO READ THIS SMALL, ALL CAPS MESSAGE.

The Walking Dead games use story as a game play mechanic and it has truly innovated the way stories can be told in an interactive medium. I wanted to talk about these two stories in particular because I have recently played through both of them a second time and realized that these games, despite their amazing stories, totally fumble the whole, your choice changes the game, thing. Or perhaps it’s us who misunderstood the intentions of the choices given.

The first thing that stands out about The Walking Dead is that the story is decided based on the decisions you make. Haha I’m totally kidding! Your journey is determined by your choice, not the story itself. Regardless of the many choices you’re given throughout the entire franchise, The Walking Dead games tell the exact story they intend to tell. Let’s look at some examples.

Lee is still going to die after his zombie bite. It doesn’t matter if you choose to have his arm cut off or not. You’re still going to sit through that terribly emotional scene where, in my case, I had Clementine shoot him. Rough stuff.

That scene with Lee confronting Clementine’s kidnapper plays out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, even if you played the game totally different the second time around. Seriously, his primary beef with you and your crew is when everyone stole his supplies, which in turn caused his wife to leave him and wind up dying. Play the game differently and try not to steal his stuff and your group robs his ass blind anyway and he still thinks you’re the world’s biggest asshole despite the fact that you sat on the sidelines.

I saved Carly instead of Doug because I thought maybe being her knight in shining armor would get me laid. I saved Doug the second time around because I knew Carly wasn’t going to put out. Doesn’t matter though because not only did Doug also fail to put out, but he is still shot in the face by Lilly the same way Carly was.

I saved Duck instead of Shawn because he was the helpless little boy. The second time around I saved Shawn instead. What happened? Duck still gets saved and Shawn still winds up being a human happy meal. The only difference is that you piss Kenny off and have to spend the rest of the game with him reminding you of what a dick move that was.

I helped Kenny drop a salt lick on Larry’s head when he died. What happens if you play it differently? Well, instead of helping Kenny drop a salt lick on Larry’s head, I helped Lilly try to revive him. Guess what happened? Kenny dropped it on his freaking head anyway, only this time Lilly wasn’t mad at me. Still, that didn’t stop her from becoming a psychotic team killing fuck tard.

So the game doesn’t really adapt to your choices in a way that determines the ending. Think of each decision as a fork in a road. Each side of that fork will be different, but in the end the roads are connected again.

Season Two plays out the same way. No matter what you do you can’t save Pete or Alvin, Arvo still brings his gang after you and winds up shooting you, and Kenny will definitely get his face smashed in by Carver. Probably the most annoying thing in Season Two, for me any way, was Luke’s death. You can either not help him and watch him drown, or you can try to help him, fall in the lake, get saved by Luke, and watch a zombie drag him down where he’ll drown anyway as he’s being simultaneously eaten. That scene just feels like a slap in the face. Like who cares? Why bother saving him if there is no chance he makes it off of this frozen lake either way?

People boast about Season 2 having like five different endings and they’re wrong. There’s five different ways to reach the end, but the end is the same regardless. It’s just a matter of who will be standing next to you when you get to that point. Clementine and the baby will be there every time. But did you let Kenny kill Jane (you’re an ass if you did)? Or did you shoot Kenny? From there you can either forgive the victor and they’ll join you or you can choose to go your own way. So in reality there is one ending, just multiple different choices you can make as to who will be with you.

One other thing I’ve learned from playing these games twice is there are no good choices, ever. You’re always a douche bag to someone. Even if you try to play neutral, you’re decisions always seem to have a negative consequence. The entirety of Season One is like that. Quite literally everything you did for Clementine as Lee (our hero) is used against you at the end when the kidnapper tells you how terrible you’ve done raising a little girl in the apocalypse. Like there’s a right way? Of course he says this to you moments before he opens a bowling bag with his dead wife’s zombie head inside and starts talking to it. I’m sure that’s less emotionally jarring to a little girl than teaching her how to defend herself against the dead people trying to eat her.   

Regardless of that crazy bastard, other characters judge the living piss out of you. Did you try save Omid or his pregnant girlfriend, Christa, as they tried jumping onto the train? Doesn’t matter, the person you saved first will verbally attack you for not saving the other person before them, even though you wind up saving them both. Um, you’re fucking welcome! At one point you’re tasked with passing out five food items to people when there are eleven in your group. Yet instead of people being understanding adults and letting the kids eat first, they gripe at you like the selfish babies they are.

How about the cannibal farm? Oh it wasn’t really just my idea to come out to this farm and trade gas for some of their food during a time where only some of us got to eat today, right? I mean, we were all kind of like, starving and wanting food. Yet when we realized we were eating our wounded pal, who we thought was being taken care of by these awfully nice farm folk, it’s all of a sudden my fault that we were there. Piss off people. Kenny got pissed off because I put a girl out of her misery while she was being eaten alive. So selfish was he to use her as a distraction while we got away. Imagine dying a painful death where human teeth are ripping your flesh right off of you. Yeah, shoot me if that’s ever happening to me. Regardless, if you let her live the zombies still find and chase you. Some good that did.

Don’t let any of this deter you. If you’ve read this far and still want to play these games, despite me having ruined everything, I implore you to do so! You have to understand that your choices will not put a dent in how the story is played out, but that story is just so amazing. The relationship between Lee and Clementine is so strong that when its foundation is shook, you cannot help but feel the real human pain these fictional characters can’t. I won’t lie. I cried a couple of times during the first game. Watching as the young Duck dies from his zombie bite was tragic to me and not just because I’m a dad. Watching his parents walk him out into the woods all I could hear is his harsh shallow breathing and it just crushed me. That entire scene was tragic. If you have played this game and didn’t shed a tear as Lee had to say goodbye to Clementine then you’re a sociopath who probably murders people for fun.

So with all of this said it’s hard to harp on The Walking Dead games because they are truly amazing experience to have as a gamer. I just feel there is a misconception on what your choices are intended to do. I’m not sure if that stems from the developer telling us that the choices effect the game or if it’s us gamers assuming that a game that includes choice must provide us different conclusions. Regardless, this is a fantastic franchise and I look forward to Season Three.  

No comments:

Post a Comment