Telltale Games is on their third episode of Playing Dead, the show designed to discuss the development of their upcoming game The Walking Dead, and finally we get to see some real in-game footage. There aren’t as many zombies, or walkers, as one might expect, and that’s because the gameplay is more about the living than the dead. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t any combat or violence, because there is. But The Walking Dead seems to be more interested in how the living interacts with each other in an undead world.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead game looks like it will focus on the interactions between characters combined with MacGyver-like puzzle solving. There are of course zombies, but if you’re looking for an undead shoot ‘em up blood bath, The Walking Dead isn’t for you. Some of the gameplay looks to be more in tune with some old point and click adventure games, where finding items and their corresponding uses make up most of the noncombat gameplay. In part three of Playing Dead (below), the player find some food in what looks to be an old general store and chooses to give it to one of the game’s characters.
While there may be less combat than players are used to seeing from a zombie game, the combat that is there attempts to recapture the visceral nature of the genre. So far each zombie encounter seems to be unique, or at least the one in the video is. The combat in these situations becomes more of a test of a player’s motor skills, allowing them to make combat decisions much in the same way that they make other decisions, except if you don’t act fast enough you will most likely be eaten. Think Heavy Rain except the punishment for failure isn’t death as much as undeath.
Episode 1 will be out in a few weeks which is perfect for those mourning the end of the second season of AMC’s The Walking Dead. Although they take place at different times, both are of the same canon, and it will be interesting to see this particular apocalypse from a new perspective.
