Ramblingly - Story vs Gameplay?

The Walking Dead shuffled into my life via the steam sale, it cornered me in a motel room with only my blood-stained keyboard to protect me. I repeatedly mashed the Q key to save me but it wasn’t enough, my rib cage was torn open, my heart torn out and swallowed whole. I lay in agony whilst my lungs struggled out a few final gasps. Hours later I reanimated, only to join the herd as another brainless zombie. I, like many others, became an enthusiast of the Walking Dead game.

This story has been true for the many gamers that have played the episodic series from Telltale Games – a company whose entire business model seems to be from license based interactive experiences. The Walking Dead game has been a hit for 2012, seen in just about every top ten list and bagging Game of the Year from SpikeTV’s VGA’s, Wired, Official Xbox Mag, Games Radar and many others. 

manymanymany others.

In my eyes the game is completely deserving of these accolades – although the game itself isn’t without its flaws. Some of them are quite glaring. 

Arguably almost every action scene is simply a set of quick time events in which you repeatedly pound the Q key until it relinquishes and lets you press the E key, then you click on a zombies’ face to watch your character smack its brains in with a bat or whatever comes to hand. 

PREPARE YOURSELF.

The controls can be quite sloppy in the early episodes, especially when I’m trying to click on a zombie face, sometimes I feel like the mouse is moving rather sludgy and isn’t registering my frantic clicking – maybe it’s meant to feel like this, I’ve never really been confronted with smashing a recently deceased persons face in real life and I can only imagine that it’s probably not as easy as you would like to pretend.

The puzzles aren’t especially challenging either. Most of the time the puzzles are simply a pick up and click affair. But on the other side of that argument, it means I’m never stuck on a frustrating puzzle trying to rub my inventory together to create some sort of wonder object that’ll let me progress - which is usually the done thing in point and clicks.

Fuck you Broken Sword 2.

None of these are game breakers however, what the crux is with the Walking Dead is the story, the drama, the characters and pacing is what makes this game so darn engaging.

Every decision and action you make seems to hold weight - right down to your dialogue choice. Of course this could just be seen as some kind of illusion – that in reality no choice you make has any real change or effect upon the overall story. 

Then again, what game really does? 

woah

Woah.

Considering another game I’ve enjoyed this year it raises the question of Story versus Gameplay - Subset Studio’s ‘FTL’ a space ship simulator where you play a sort of omnipotent space captain in a battle against the rebel fleet and Random Number Generators. 

The story element is incredibly basic: Get your ship from A to B. Try not to die.

And die you shall.

Dying is central to the game, even in a tip pop up you’re told to get used to it. Watching the ship that once held so much promise at the start of the session crumble and fall into vastness of space. You lose any attachment to your crew and ship after you see this happen for the hundredth million time.

Over and over.

There’s nothing wrong with this, in fact mastering the immediately steep difficulty curve (and the game with it) you begin to feel like a Picard or whatever space captain you’d prefer to be from science fiction (In retrospect I should have forced some Farscape references into this article). 

Hah! What the fuck was this show about again?

 It creates that illusion. Well, you do, but it’s that immersion it stems from this that is crucial. You as the player are dragged into the game - forget about rent, next payday and the tomato at the back of the fridge slowly moulding. 

You. You are a hero.

The Walking Dead does this with superb writing, fleshed out characters and set pieces. FTL does it with pure gameplay. 

So do I want FTL to have fleshed out NPC’s? Of course not, I want the little alien dude to go fix the hole in the ship’s hull; I AM THE CAPTAIN FFS - I don’t care about petty squabbling about rations. 

"GET TO WORK JOHN."

Do I want Walking Dead to have more challenging gameplay elements? Again, no, I want to invest myself in some good old human drama in a post-apocalyptic setting – mostly concerning rations. 

Not pictured: Rations.

It’s interesting to have such great experiences with two incredibly different kinds of games; variety is the spice of life indeed. It also says a lot about the way gaming is slowly but surely maturing into its own dynamic and fantastic medium. 

Also I totally did NOT cry at the end of Walking Dead. 

....

Honest…