Steam summer sales ended and my wallet is happy about it, but they didn’t end soon enough to stop my attention from being caught by The Walking Dead, and I bought it though I was expecting yet another zombie shooter game. I got excited when I found out it was a graphic adventure instead, and as a graphic adventures fan I have quite a few things to say about this game.

In TWD you play as Lee, a guy that apparently committed a crime and is on his way to jail when the zombie apocalypse starts. After fleeing from a bunch of zombies, he comes across a little girl called Clementine, whose parents were on vacations when the disaster reached her neighborhood. And so your journey begins, looking for a place that is not infested by the undead, looking for Clementine’s parents, and most of all, looking to survive.

The graphics don’t really stand out, but are good enough to make the characters’ look between realistic and cartoonish. They reminded me of Borderlands’ graphics. The music, on the other way, is amazing. Most songs (I can’t say all of them because I didn’t really pay THAT much attention to it) suit their scene perfectly, and the music itself is beautiful.

So, the story was very good, the graphics were just fine and the music was stunning. The gameplay, on the other hand, was not as great as I expected.

Every time you start a chapter, you receive this message on the screen: “This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.” Of course, when I first saw that I got even more excited. A graphic adventure where your decisions matter? That’s two of my favorite things combined.

Well… turned out it was not as much like that. Yes, when you take decisions the dialogs change, some cutscenes change, but the core of the story doesn’t. Important points of the story won’t change, no matter what you do, and sometimes they even look forced. I’m taking about scenes where, lets say, a character dies because he choked while eating peanuts. So you could think, if you hadn’t picked up those peanuts in the previous chapter you could have avoided their dead. Nope. If you didn’t pick up the peanuts before, then that character is going to die choking on their own saliva.

There’s a Kotaku article titled “Yes, Your Choices In The Walking Dead Mattered” (contains massive spoilers) that basically says even if your choices don’t change the story, they change the protagonist’s life. Even though their argument is fine, I have to disagree with that title. I was promised a story that was “tailored by how I play”, and that’s not what I got.

So yes, I was pretty disappointed about that matter. Also, the puzzles on the game are not challenging, they’re all really intuitive and easy to solve.**

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the game. As a fan of games with a good storyline and The Walking Dead series, I didn’t get bored of it. I even grew fold of several characters, specially Clementine, even though I despise kids. (But she’s so adorable!) I bought the game on a Steam sale for around 6 dollars, and I think it was totally worth the price. I probably wouldn’t buy the second part of the game series, though. It was fun. It was not THAT fun.

Unlike I did with Corpse Party: Blood Covered - Repeated Fear (to mention another horror game where your decisions matter), which I recommended even though it is mostly a visual novel, I would rather recommend The Walking Dead to people that enjoy visual novels and good storylines more than action games and hard puzzles.