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The Walking Dead: 400 Days
We had hoped that
Telltale would continue with the excellent series that they seemed to
catch lightning in a bottle with. The game is an amalgamation of styles
that captures the spirit of The Walking Dead comics and the AMC TV show.
It’s about characters, it’s about choices, and best of all the
characters are depicted as people. They are every day normal people. Who
are flawed in their humanity, and that’s what we can all relate to.
Because as people we all have our own emotional baggage, we all have
that factor called the human condition.
The series is interactive adventures in the vein of
an old school choose your path adventure RPG book. The first season of
the game series was spectacular; Telltale Games has a lot to live up to.
Now The Walking Dead: 400 days is not a full season
really, I view it as akin to the excellent well-made web episodes that
we get to see online of The Walking Dead TV show. These little bridge
type stories are kind of bonuses to the fans and it’s nice that Telltale
games is mirroring this aspect. We get to see 5 stories about other
people that are trying to survive in a world gone mad. This was an
excellent choice for Telltale games. Because it makes the world all the
more real and all the more interesting because there are other lives and
other situations that take place.
The Walking Dead: 400 days takes place at a truck
stop along a Georgia highway. This DLC episode is for season 1 of The
Walking Dead game, by Telltale Games. It links up five stories of people
trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. The time frame measures from
day 1 to 400 days later after the event that started it all.
The stories are all linked, as the player lives
through this drama they are again faced with gut wrenching choices. Just
like the first games choices carry over, so will the choices made her in
The Walking Dead: 400 Days. Choices here will affect things over into
season 2 of the game.
I enjoyed this little bridge, though I did find that
the shortness of this adventure made it harder to care about the
character like I did with the first season of the game. It still has its
moments that you do care about the other human beings that are living
this horror with you. But the emotional investment was not as strong as
the full first season characters. You do learn a bit about everyone, so
you do feel some ties with them, each one of them showing some aspect of
the human condition.
It’s like jumping into someone’s lives and from the
conversations you can see that everyone has some kind of history. It’s
all introduced through every day dialogue that the characters have with
each other. Nothing ever feels forced. Each story throws up different
situations in a world gone mad. Like most human beings players will
either like the characters or not like them at all due to a character
trait. That’s ok, because if you have that response then not only has
the writers done their jobs really well, so did the actors who have to
be in the moment and bring these characters to life for us. Did they?
Yes.
Game play is pretty much the same as the first season
game though it seemed a bit easier and less twitchy in regards to
controls, so you will be able to jump right in and enjoy this ride. This
is an awesome way to ramp us up to season 2 of the game series.
The Walking Dead: 400 Days is an interactive horror
drama at its best.
Have fun, play games…. Survive a zombie apocalypse
Edwin Millheim
United States Editor
Impulse Gamer
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