Walking Ahead - a superior comic book gaming adaptation

I’ve done some superhuman things in games based on comic books. I’ve saved Gotham City from dangerous criminals. I’ve diverted disaster from New York on more than one occasion. I’ve teamed up with Earth’s mightiest heroes in order to take on foes no single warrior could withstand. And I’ve made a little girl smile. And that last one feels the most superhuman of them all. 

It’s a great year to love comic book games. Arkham City GOTY edition is right around the corner, Spidey seems back to his joyful, web-slinging, free-roaming self in The Amazing Spiderman, and we’ve seen a spate of lesser-known heroes feature in games who, a few years ago, could only dream of that kind of mainstream exposure. Count yourself very lucky indeed, Rocket Raccoon.

But in creating a truthful comic book adaptation, there’s one title that stands head and shoulders above the rest;  towering over Thor, beating the Bat and swinging ahead of Spiderman - The Walking Dead, a downloadable serial from Telltale games.

This Californian studio, with a focus on episodic gaming and digital distribution, has enjoyed only lukewarm success with some very big franchise licenses in the past, including cult favourites Jurassic Park and Back To The Future. But, with The Walking Dead, they've hit the nail very firmly embedded in the proverbial zombie head.

Lee Everett: Better Than Batman

The hugely successful comic book series from Image, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn initially by Tony Moore and later by Charlie Adlard, is a gut-punching but intelligent and ultimately reflective series that, in the wrong developer’s hands, could have very easily turned into the newest mindless zombie pummeler.

In the comic books, our primary protagonist is Rick Grimes, a Kentucky sheriff’s deputy who awakens from a gunshot-inflicted coma into the nightmare of a zombie apocalypse. In the early days of the disaster, he’s presented as morally immoveable; the very face of law and order, as emphasised by his decision to continue wearing his police uniform as a symbol of his unshakeable ethical values. But as time goes on and the world realigns to accommodate the new order, even he eventually must concede that all men can and will do whatever is necessary to survive given desperate enough circumstances. And symbolically, he gradually sheds his uniform over time, losing or adapting his rigid code of conduct as the line he treads between right and wrong blurs until it’s almost indistinguishable. Morally, he has the furthest to fall, and Rick goes to some very murky moral depths indeed in the name of survival.

In The Walking Dead game, we are given a main character who at first seems to be Rick’s polar opposite. Lee Everett is a convicted murderer on his way to rot in prison when events conspire surprisingly well in his favour. Out of all the survivors, Lee has the most to gain from this new status quo. Whether he's guilty of his alleged crimes or not we have yet to discover; whether he’s an innocent victim or a brutal man whose particular talents means he adapts well to his new environment, is down to your interpretation. 

But no matter how you choose to play Lee, by the end of the game’s first episode he and Rick have one very crucial thing in common. If they die, another fragile life hangs in the balance. No matter how they feel about saving their own skin, they each have a reason, and in some cases - an excuse, for doing whatever means necessary to survive. They are fathers. For Rick, it’s his son Carl who, tellingly, he gives his sheriff’s deputy hat to early in the series run and Carl still wears to this day. For Lee, it’s Clementine; a surprisingly emotionally mature little girl he finds alone in a tree house and feels compelled to do the right thing by. Carl and Clementine are the moral compasses of each tale; how do you behave at the end of the world when an impressionable young mind is always watching and learning by your example? 

When you mess up as Batman in a game, you put the entire city of Gotham at risk. Or you would, but to mess up even slightly results in Game Over. Batman simply can’t afford such critical mistakes - that’s why he’s Batman. In other comic book gaming adaptations, the stakes are high but arguably, you aren’t emotionally invested - Gotham’s safety is only a vague threat that would result in having to restart from a previous checkpoint. In The Walking Dead game, you survive to keep Clem safe, because if you die, there’s no-one else left with her best interests at heart.  What could have been the most tedious element of a survival horror game is here its most compelling mechanic – the act of looking after a small child. And true to the comic book and Rick’s often difficult relationship with Carl, that can mean very different things depending on your outlook. 

At the end of Chapter Two of The Walking Dead game, an event occurs that feels almost like an afterthought, but in reality it underpins the crux of the series. The hungry, tired and injured group happens upon a car loaded with supplies, and there is no one around to claim it. Everyone is delighted at this exceptionally well-timed slice of serendipity, but Clementine feels uncomfortable. She asks, what if the car’s owners return? Then, aren’t they no better than bandits? Here you must make a choice; you can either agree with Clem and watch as the rest of the group proceed in stripping the car of valuables anyway, or you can convince her that it’s ok to take what isn’t yours, given the difficult state of affairs. Another player and I made very different choices here, but both claimed we had Clem’s best interests at heart. He decided that teaching her how to survive was the most important lesson, and that sooner or later, she would have to do something that she felt was wrong in order to stay safe anyway. I, on the other hand, decided that teaching her right from wrong was more important; because that was, after all, all that separated us from the likes of the St John brothers or the Governor. But maybe I’m just as naïve as Rick Grimes used to be. 

I'll admit, I have my off-days, but...

It’s not just the moral choices that make the game such a solid adaptation, though. Down to the letter, the gameplay is true to the tone of survival over action, and it never feels like it’s hampered by the contrivances of being a game. One of my major gripes about Arkham City was that you didn’t always feel like Batman. Because when, after all, would Batman ever procrastinate by bumming around a city hunting trophies when people’s lives were at stake? When exactly would Superman spend time solving mazes when a busload of kids in Moscow needed his help? But in that sense, maybe The Walking Dead has an easier time of making every action meaningful, because it’s on a smaller scale. Given the context, dividing too few rations amongst hungry survivors becomes a hundred times more difficult and emotionally loaded than plugging zombies full of bullets.

Like the comic book series, the focus of The Walking Dead game isn't on the shambling corpses, but the shambolic living, and how far you'd go to keep yourself and the ones you care about alive. If this Walking Dead game were just about racking up headshots, it would have missed the point spectacularly. It’s about survival, and so, as a kind of point and click adventure, it rewards curiosity, diligence, collection and keen observation. Justified or misplaced suspicion of strangers can save or condemn you. Like Rick often did, you judge people out of fear and desperation and a primal urge to protect what’s dear to you. But, in giving Lee Everett ambiguous motivations and a past that the player doesn't yet fully understand, Telltale created a complex character that has rarely graced other gaming comic book adaptations. Though plenty of other comic book heroes possess character complexities that their many thousands of panels and decades of comic books convey, their relatively short time on screen, more often than not, focuses on exposition rather than characterization. And the result is a rather two-dimensional protagonist where developers have eschewed meaningful motivations in favour of plenty of action. And cool gadgets.

As yet, there is no end goal or ultimate objective in the game and in the ongoing comic book series. The game is won in small victories; whether that's rebuilding a fence, reducing a human skull to porridge or ensuring a lost little girl is warm and dry. Above all else, you simply keep the living alive and the dead dead, just as Rick does. 

And so far, that’s made for two equally fantastically flawed individual's interpretations of a world where doing the right thing can often feel so very wrong, and doing the wrong thing can sometimes be the only option. But whether you’re reading it in the black and white of the comic or you’re actively responsible for Lee’s decisions, it’s gripping stuff. 

Like I said, it’s a great year to love comic book games. Now when’s the next episode?