
	Platform PC Genre Adventure Publisher TellTale Games Developer Telltale Games ESRB M (Mature) Released April 27, 2012

- Adventure game pace is perfect fit for Walking Dead - Actual death - Looks cool - No saves allowed!

- Really ramps up then has to stop - It will be too slow for anyone expecting a zombie gore-fest

Review: The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day (360) Review: Dead Space 2 (360) Review: Sam & Max Season 2 (PC)
Newsletter
Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly. Enter E-Mail Address Below: Subscribe \| Unsubscribe

The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day

Score: 9.0 / 10

The protagonist of The Walking Dead, Lee Everett, gets up close and personal with a zombie in the opening minutes of A New Day. It's an encounter where he edges along the ground on his back away from a crawling zombie and if there's an error in judgement it's a ticket to a "procedure" that would send most otolaryngologists into a tizzy.

Lee wound up dead on his very first zombie encounter.

This adventure game trope that used to be so common in earlier days, seems to have been abandoned in more recent games so to be confronted with the "Game Over" screen was slightly jarring. Also, jarring is the fact there are no save game slots.

Lee makes choices and has to live with them. There's no opportunity to "quickload" a save state to before an awful or even seemingly minor decision needs to be

Advertisement

- PC Game Reviews
- Adventure Game Reviews

made. There are plenty of checkpoints throughout so it's not as if the game asks that you sit down for a solid two hours to play through the entirety of the first episode.

While there's no doubt that The Walking Dead is an adventure game, the bulk of the game isn't about solving puzzles. It's about conversations. Lots of them. And every dialogue choice offers

Advertisement

unclear results (in comparison to the likes of the Mass Effect 3 where it's easy to discern the good, medium, and evil choices), sometimes with a very fast-closing window to respond. The game lets the player know the results of some of these decisions, like how a character will remember how Lee reacted or how much other characters trust Lee. Whether or not any of this information is brought forward in future episodes or how it might affect the overall outcome remains to be seen.

The puzzles that are in this first episode are of the real world variety. (No rubber chickens... at least not yet.) Lee knows he needs the brick to smash the window across the street so the TVs inside can distract the zombies long enough for him to make a quick trip. But how can he break the lock on the door that's preventing him from getting the brick? There are really only a couple of noticeable puzzles.

As an opening act, A New Day did what it was supposed to: get me interested in the next episode even if the overall universe of Walking Dead completely depresses me. It's not that there's no happy ending; it's that there's not even real respite from the horror of what's going on. And that's exactly what happens at the end of the first episode.

"Hey, we've got beds to sleep on, electricity..."

Nope. They're all screwed. This is after all, The Walking Dead, where the only thing more dangerous than a zombie horde is other survivors.

- Aaron Simmer

(May 16, 2012)