The Walking Dead Episode 5 Game
Kanisha Dezarn
The Walking Dead is an American post-apocalyptic television series based on the comic book of the same name by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, and developed for television by Frank Darabont. It premiered on the cable network AMC on October 31, 2010.[1] The series focuses on Rick Grimes, a sheriff's deputy who slips into a coma after being shot. He awakens to find himself in a dangerous new world that has been overrun by "walkers". He joins a group of survivors (including his wife and son) as they try to survive in a world among the undead.[2]
In October 2019, the series was renewed for an eleventh season.[3] In September 2020, AMC confirmed that the eleventh season would be the series' last and would consist of 24 episodes broadcast from 2021 to 2022.[4] The eleventh season premiered on August 22, 2021.[5] During the course of the series, 177 episodes of The Walking Dead aired over eleven seasons, between October 31, 2010, and November 20, 2022.
A special titled "The Journey So Far" aired on October 16, 2016, as a recap of the first six seasons of The Walking Dead, featuring interviews with the cast and producers. It was watched by 2.18 million viewers.[183]
Prior to the start of season 2, a six-episode web series called Torn Apart premiered on October 3, 2011, on AMC's official website. The web series is directed by special effects makeup artist and co-executive producer Greg Nicotero and tells the origin story of Hannah, also known as "Bicycle Girl", the walker that Rick Grimes killed out of mercy and whose bicycle he took in the first episode of the TV series.[184]
A four-episode web series entitled Cold Storage was released on October 1, 2012.[185] Set during the zombie apocalypse, Cold Storage follows the story of Chase as he seeks shelter in a storage facility under the command of B.J., a malicious former employee who hides a very dark secret. The storage unit Chase is given was owned by Rick Grimes.
A three-part webisode series, entitled The Oath, was released on October 1, 2013. This series tells the origin of the "Don't Open, Dead Inside" paint on the cafeteria doors of the hospital Rick Grimes awakes in, post-apocalypse. It follows Paul and Karina as they escape their zombie-overrun camp in search of a medical station. The central theme of the series examines the will to persevere in the face of inevitable death.[186]
A six-part webisode series entitled Red Machete first premiered on October 22, 2017. The web series tells the origin story of Rick Grimes's red machete. The series starred actors Jose Rosete, Anais Lilit, Sofia Esmaili,[187] and Jeff Kober, reprising his role as Joe, the leader of the Claimers from the fourth season of The Walking Dead.[188]
They pursue her all the way back to the road, which is a pretty long ways given the trek to the cabin the day before, but even grievously injured Jadis manages to make it back to her vehicle and a high speed chase ensues. Jadis gets away and runs into the same exact three bandits that Rick and Michonne encountered the day before. She enlists them to her cause and they set an ambush in a nearby building.
The episode ends with Gabriel returning on the chosen day to meet with Jadis and not finding her. He waits, but soon realizes that she must be dead, or at least that she has chosen not to come for some reason. This is the same scene from the start of the episode, when he heard what sounded like two helicopters fly over him. In the end scene, however, we only see one. Could it be a CRM scouting chopper headed to Alexandria? An invasion force? Rick and Michonne making their triumphant return?
All told, while there were some good moments here and there, overall this was another huge letdown. Jadis tracking Rick and Michonne like that was just too much. The fact that our heroes get out of every scrape with such ease kills the tension. Introducing cool new zombies that actually look difficult to kill, and then showing Rick stab one with a tiny knife a few scenes later, is really annoying because the cool new zombies should have been a much bigger threat.
Telltale's first episode of their adaptation of The Walking Dead has a lot of work to do. After the terrible Jurassic Park provided an exclamation point at the end of a series of increasingly disappointing releases, reputations need rescuing here. So can the zombie thriller adventure redeem the adventure veterans? I've decided Wot I Think.
I'd argue people have had just about enough of zombies, so the burst of popularity for The Walking Dead as a comic and TV series was a bit of an oddity. In a world increasingly weary of yet more zombie franchises inhabited only by people who have somehow never seen any of the others, a bit more self-awareness or irony is usually demanded. But The Walking Dead comic's concept has barely stumbled forward from Romero's originals. The first series of Showtime's played out more like a tribute to the Living Dead series, lacking a single original notion of its own, at a painfully slow and repetitive pace. So it seems wise of Telltale to have started a parallel story in the same universe.
Instead, this is a story about a man who falls over a LOT. But an interesting man. Lee, your character, is a standard of zombie fiction, but not the one you'd normally expect to be playing. He was being escorted to prison in a police car when the outbreak began, and an amiable chat with the officer reveals that whatever it was you're jailed for, you likely did it. So you're the mysterious one you're not sure if you can trust. (Although it's worth noting it's a shame that a rare appearance of a black character as a protagonist should have to be a convicted felon.)
After the cop car crashes, you finally wake up sideways in the back seat, the policeman lying dead on the ground outside. Get out, and with no surprise at all he'll attack you. Then when dealt with things pretty speedily move you along to meeting your first gang of misfits with whom you'll try to survive, including a young child called Clementine.
Lee is a man of few words, which again makes for an interesting player character. It means, when given a selection of possible replies and a time limit to choose from them, you think a bit more carefully about what you want to say. Lee would. And a lot of those early choices are about how much you want to share - do you keep Lee extremely guarded, or open up about being a convicted criminal to others? The choices make a difference to how the game plays, how people react to you. And there are far bigger choices to make along the way, which seem like they'll be reflected in future episodes, as well as within this one.
And overall, this is a good story. Again, as with the majority of zombie fiction, it doesn't attempt to do anything original. It's a small group of survivors, each with their own quirks, trying to defend temporarily safe locations, while arguing with each other. But as is the point of the genre, it's not about the undead outside, but the nature of the humans still alive, and here it succeeds. Relationships, the danger of sharing too much in a tense situation, individual values, and the confusion of previous concerns in an utterly different world, all play out pretty well.
Being adventure sorts, Telltale began with classic point and click interfaces, and then adapted them for their console and portable versions. But here the process has clearly happened in reverse, the game originally intended to be played with a controller, and then peculiarly reverse-engineered to work with the mouse and keyboard. The result is an oddly gloopy confusion, where WASD occasionally control your character in third person movement, and other times don't, while your mouse controls what's essentially an analogue cursor in soupy movements around the screen. Switch to a 360 controller, which the game elegantly lets you do - automatically changing the on-screen instructions accordingly - and you realise that your mouse has actually been emulating the restrictions of an analogue stick. Which is berserk.
It's not helping that hot spots are often arbitrary. Look at the right object, but not the right spot on it, and there's no recognition. Why isn't the whole object a hotspot? And it gets worse, with hotspots completely misplaced, hovering to the left of the thing they're related to. For example:
The art style is splendid, a Borderlands-esque rotoscoped style, evoking comic drawings in 3D models. But this is Telltale's engine stretched to its very limits, and it creaks heavily. Everything looks great, but I wonder if the zombies are a little too cartoonish. In the more horrific moments, they can end up looking comical. And the developer's old audio issues are back, the quality compressed so much to get a vast amount of dialogue into the game's total 450MB, that voices bubble and pop. Which is a huge shame since the actors are all very good. Most bizarrely, at one point early on a character's voice blips and then seemingly finishes a sentence in another voice, in German some other language. Take a look:
A bunch of bugs plagued as I played. One crash lost a bunch of progress, thanks to the extremely ungenerous chapter-based saves. And at one point I was being haunted by a pair of batteries, that mysteriously floated around the screen.
Talking of those batteries, the strangest moment in what's otherwise a really decent story comes when a reporter for a local radio station can't get a radio to work. It turns out it doesn't have batteries in - fine, sure, everyone makes mistakes. But then when you offer to find some, she replies, "Thanks, I wouldn't know what to look for." So mystified is she by the concept of batteries that she then puts them in back-to-front. The pathetic helpless girl moment really doesn't suit the character, nor the entire game, and just comes across as insulting to everyone involved.
But that is the exception to an otherwise well crafted plot. It gets properly dark in places, brutal choices with brutal consequences, and there are some really nice lines. It's extremely sweary, which feels a little at odds with Telltale's cartoonish bobble-head style, but completely appropriate for the occasion. Arguments are cruel, people are going to die, and it embraces the bleak near-hopelessness of the genre. And they don't avoid the weirdness of an adult man turning up with a small child who isn't his daughter.