Oh god dammit. Jesus my god what the fuck?

After we finished Little Hope we kept the ball rolling and bought Seasons 1, 2 & 3 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I think I played a demo of this on the iPad years ago but outside of that I’ve seen some interent memes with Clem but that’s about it. Sometimes I’m surprised that things that have been around forever have not been spoiled for me and man, oh my god jesus this game wasn’t spoiled but fuck me is this heart wrenching.

I had every intention of documenting our progress of this game after each chapter but the day got away from us and still in our post-christmas, “I don’t wanna grow up” millennial Toys-R-Us haze, we rolled straight through the entire thing on this lazy Saturday. First off, I love how much control it feels like your decisions have. Going from a DPA game to this and I think Telltale uses the interpersonal relationships so much better. When you lie or attempt to deceive or raise your voice the characters take note and boy will they throw that shit right back in your face. The cast of characters here is pretty interesting, I’ve been a fan of the show so seeing some of those characters pop in and out of the story is cool, it has the effect the execs at Marvel think seeing a random comic character appear in a 30 second post-credit sequence would have.

Since we’ve ploughed through all five of these episodes today, I’m going to highlight some of our choices and how we felt about them. When we play the next season, and it’s already loaded up on the switch, I’ll try to keep better notes but we were only-game-nothing-else today.

In the first episode we saved Duck, which caused the death of Hershel’s son Shawne. This pushed us out of the farma and into the truck with Kenny. When we get to the pharmacy we choose to defend Duck which put us on the bad side of Lenny immediately. Lenny was such a piece of shit my god. I’ve worked with guys like that and what hell it must be to have to go through the apocalypse with them.

In the second episode I felt bad about putting the pitchfork through that farm brother but only because Clem was watching and we hadn’t a chance to talk about it before hand. We left his other brother alive when all was said and done, but since his momma and about 100 other walkers were heading towards him I don’t think they lasted too long.

We did choose to loot the station wagon because if you flea your vehicle with the keys in it, leaving the lights on and doors open in the middle of the trail… your car is going to get looted. Had it been pulled off the trail and kept even slightly incognito it would have been fine. That should been the lesson, not that it’s wrong to take a random sweatshirt.

Okay here’s the real takeaway - as soon as Chuck (Charles) showed up we decided we needed to protect him at all costs. He was the best character and the one we wanted to see go the distance so I’m disappointed that his death felt so pointless, all he did was save Ben who would cut and run at every turn.

Completely blindsided that Vernon decided to steal our boat, I did not see that coming. Also Catrena and I were convinced he was voiced by either Stan Lee or Larry King, both are dead now but I think they were still alive when this game was first made.

VERY upset that this station wagon freak blew up the entire group and caused Lee to get bit. That final scene with Lee and Clem in the jewelry store was heart wrenching, incredibly brutal. The writing in this game has truly been excellent.

The controls and QTE are easy to use and easy to adapt to, in fact we never had a problem with pulling off any of the action. There were plenty of times we died but that was because we either didn’t understand the assignment or the action was quick or we made the wrong decision, but never because the controls themselves were confusing and hard to use.

I’m very sorry that cutting off Lee’s arm did not save him. I had a feeling it was too late when he passed out by the elevator but goddamn if I weren’t going to try. Clem didn’t deserve this (nobody deserves this) and I wanted to do everything to see that her and Lee were kept together as long as possible but in the end death comes for us all and it came for Lee.