Caltrops - The Walking Dead

Forum Overview :: The Walking Dead

by fabio 04/13/2014, 3:15am PDT

Definitely wait until all 5 episode are out before you buy a Telltale game. There was some clusterfuck (i.e. getting the more profitable Walking Dead Season 2 out the door first) with their release schedule and it took them almost half a year to come out with episode 2, which turned out to be the shortest at just barely over one hour. By the time all 5 episodes are done, you can probably get it for 75% off.

Anyway, I found it okay enough to play through to the end, but that's it. Story takes too long to get going; nothing really happens until the end of episode 2, and by the end of episode 3 you still don't even have a vague idea of the big picture. If this was Chinatown, you'd be at the 90 minute mark without even meeting Noah Cross yet, and no one suspecting that Hollis' death wasn't a suicide or finding out about the water scheme.

There's even less of a game here than Walking Dead. Not a single puzzle. You show up at a crime scene, listen to the main character say, "Hmmmm," to every object (the camera will tell you where you can walk and what you can look at) with little deduction, have every witness tell you they don't want to talk, then a quicktime event fight when someone loses their temper. Repeat every episode without finding out much. Every episode ends with a cliffhanger, which is quickly defused by the start of the next episode.

The main weakness though is that it's a detective story where the audience pieces it together way before the protagonist, and the characters never act on anything in a way that would quickly resolve anything. It's like watching a cop movie where they're stuck trying to trace a license plate and no one thinks to look at DMV records.

They keeps throwing out magic plot points then forgetting all about them whenever they're inconvenient for the story. The entire mystery revolves around trying to figure stuff out about a magical disguise spell (the fact that anyone can be made to perfectly impersonate anyone is never brought up as an issue somehow). Despite having an entire department at their disposal of nearly all the witches in the city in charge those spells, the characters never even think to talk to them. Both murder victims and everyone close to them are obviously under a spell that keeps them from telling you anything, but the protagonist still hasn't caught on, even after the third time he comments how strange it is everyone wearing a neck ribbon repeats the same phrase when questioned, and even after one character flat out tells him there's a spell at work. One knock at the witch department which is located in the protagonist's apartment building and the whole thing could have been solved.