Genre: Adventure | Developer: Telltale Games | Publisher: Telltale Games
Platform: 360, PS3, PC, Mac| Players: 1| Rating: ESRB: M  / PEGI: 18

I find myself at a point now that I eagerly await each new episode of Telltale Games The Walking Dead as obsessively I anticipate new episodes of the popular TV show itself.  That should be considered praise in itself considering how much I enjoy the AMC produced show.

Its the well crafted story, the deep and developed characters and the manner in which you can significantly impact both within Telltale’s licensed fiction that keeps me coming back.

From a gameplay perspective, its plainly obvious that these games will never set your world alight; given that they’re essentially little more than terrifyingly linear hand holding exercises meant only to expedite you to the next section of dialogue or decision making event.

‘Long road ahead’ is superb at combining bleak and shocking events with much more tender, personable moments. Its the sort of nuanced storytelling that you rarely see in other games.

Though it is perhaps a touch churlish to belittle the game in this fashion, such an observation remains accurate; the game is a basic point and click puzzler with the puzzles being little more than mild inconveniences for you to get past in order to propel the narrative forward.

Action sequences are present too, but just like before they are either QTE based exercises or shooting sections which are overly generous with aiming assists and timing; proof enough that the developers don’t want these kinetic interludes to slow progression in the plot any.

There’s nothing here that will test your gaming acumen here, but with two episodes under your belt already you should be fine with that and if you’re not, then you probably shouldn’t be two episodes into these games to begin with.

Because the narrative is so strong and the plight of these characters so compelling and told with such poignant drama, you find yourself forgiving the skeletal gameplay framework that tenuously holds the whole affair together; keen to experience what comes next for our beleaguered group of survivors.

Episode three titled ‘Long road ahead‘, is easily the most intense and refreshingly bold of the episodes so far when it comes storytelling; the writers take our group of survivors into some dark places here and really aren’t shy of exploring some very harrowing and bleak situations.

Yet despite the arguably darker tale being woven here, there are a number of tender, slow burning moments with certain characters.  These moments reinforce their motivations and their personalities, all the while aptly illustrating the flair of the writers when it comes to narrative juxtaposition that doesn’t seem forced or otherwise out of place.

Indeed, if episodes one and two were about the external walker and human threats respectively, then this midway entry in the season attempts to stymie your morality with a decidedly insular threat, forcing you to make life-changing decisions as the survivors pit themselves against each other in a solidly scripted plot of paranoia and mistrust as old characters depart and new ones arrive.

And stymie your morality it frequently does; there are a great many times during ‘Long road ahead’ that the developers actively question your morality when confronted with a decision with life or death stakes.  The game reaches out beyond the protagonist Lee Everett, to you, the player and asks you directly; ‘What would you do?’.

Action sequences still feature in this third episode of The Walking Dead, but as ever, they exist only to further the story and not to tax your gaming acumen in anyway.

True enough, with some pretty major moral quandaries in this episode, the developers are keen to put you through the same emotional rollercoaster that the characters themselves go through. In one instance a major character is killed by another character in the group and you have to make the decision; do I leave them to rot alone or do I bring them along with us; cutting them some slack because they had your back in a previous episode?

Really, its the biggest compliment and testament to the quality of writing when the timer appears to coerce you to make a quick choice in a tense situation, that you remember all of a characters deeds up until that point; weighing their previous acts and personalities against the provision or denial of mercy as you see fit.  These characters matter; their motivations matter and most of all the succinctly scripted plot casts them as creatures of substance and definition that you care about and are emotionally invested in.

As smoothly as the ramifications of your decisions in the previous episode flow into this one, so do the relationships formed by everybody else as well.  The continuation of their tribulations, relationships and on-going struggles into this antepenultimate episode remain a neat reminder of not just the TV serial format that the Telltale’s game so well emulates, but of the emotional attachment to the player these characters so ably perpetuate.

With the gameplay serving little more as a barely functioning transistor between dramatic events then, like previous episodes, ‘Long road ahead’ will do little to satisfy your finger-twitch. Marginal gameplay offering aside though, if I ever take stock of narratives told and characters depicted in other games and despair at their craft, I know that I will always be able to find solace in Telltale Game’s The Walking Dead to spin a coherent and emotionally compelling yarn each month.

Hopefully, Telltale Games can sustain this level of storytelling and narrative immersion because if they find themselves unable to, they won’t have much to fall back on.

Disclaimer: An Xbox 360 copy of this game was independently acquired by the reviewer

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