Which Are The Best Walking Dead Video Games?

If you thought the best way to feel like you’re living in The Walking Dead was to go to a junior doctors’ protest march, well, you’re probably right. But the next best is to play one of the numerous Walking Dead video games, currently undergoing an update with The Walking Dead: Michonne, in which the mysterious katana-wielding bit player takes centre stage for three new episodes. But how does it stack up against the previous Walking Dead games? Here’s the run-down…

Season 1 (2012)

With the TV series a huge international hit, Telltale Games took the no-brainer decision to base the first Walking Dead game on, er, the original comic book series instead, using none of the TV show characters and few even from the comics. Ker-ching, right? A point-and-click affair with an endearingly semi-realistic cartoon aesthetic, it followed university lecturer and convicted murderer Lee Everett as a car crash sets him free, a handcuffed man in a world of walkers. As someone prone to getting his foot trapped in every floorboard and metal staircase he comes within six feet of, he’s really up against it as he struggles through the suburbs and farmsteads of Georgia avoiding slow-moving meat-munchers called ‘walkers’.

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Hobbled by lengthy cut-scenes, endless conversation choices and simplistic logic challenges involving clicking on circles a lot as you hunt for batteries for a radio and such like, Series 1 focussed more on human drama than button-mulching action sequences – when Everett takes an abandoned child called Clementine under his wing to try to help her find her parents the story began to foresee The Last Of Us. As it developed, it put the player into some brutal moral situations – an arm-sawing scene was particularly harsh – making the game an immersive and powerful experience for fans of arthouse animation who are also partial to heavily-signposted puzzles.

Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (2013)

Anyone that felt Season 1 didn’t quite live up to the TV show soon changed their tune after Survival Instinct. A first-person stealth shooter developed by Terminal Reality, with the player controlling Daryl Dixon on his way to Atlanta in the opening days of the outbreak, it initially had the look of a decently tense tie-in with its periods of creeping through dark buildings by flashlight, but was quickly let down by skin-deep gameplay, bland graphics and weak storyline. Mulching zombies in an endless hunt for petrol just didn’t cut it; even Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman distanced himself from a game that, many believed, was the closest yet to what might happen if a PS3 could get food poisoning.

Season 2 (2013)

Back in comic universe, after a downloadable bridging episode called 400 Days tracing five short character stories set between the first two games, Season 2 found Clementine (totally unavoidable semi-spoiler alert) fending for herself a year after the first game. Besides neater on-screen controls little had changed stylistically, but the story certainly upped the action element from a first edition where one of the more visceral, edge-of-your-seat moments involved working out the intricate technical process to get a train’s engine started. Now, rather than merely irritating side-characters who could start their own sodding train as far as you cared, we had a proper human baddie, the dictatorial leader of a survivor group called William Carver, voiced by Michael Madsen as a kind of evil Jesse Hughes.

Where Season 2 came into its own, though, was in the lingering consequences of your decisions – not only were you in control of how Clementine grew from lost child to hardy survivor but choices the player has made right back through Season 1 and 400 Days had their (albeit often minor) butterfly-effect fallouts here. And the finale, though less hard-hitting than that of the first season, was all down to you; who lived, who died and whose only hope was to wander into a horde of zombies disguised only with guts.

Walking Dead: Michonne (2016)

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At last, a kick-ass protagonist! Off the telly! It’s still early days for the three-episode Michonne game, but the opening dream sequence of February’s episode In Too Deep, where our sword-swinging heroine decapitates walkers by the dozen, stomps them to death in barbeques and generally carries on like Uma Thurman in Already Killed Bill, is amongst the most exciting of the series so far.

Filling in Michonne’s absence from Rick Grimes’ survivor’s group in the comic series, the game has her joining the crew of The Companion hunting for survivors, where she quickly finds herself being chased by water zombies – yes, water zombies, no longer can you surf your way to safety – and stumbles into tense firearm stand-offs with a bunch of salty land-lubbers. There seems little room inside three episodes to develop the sort of rich-but-bleak storytelling the series had become known for, but what’s wrong with a quick five-hour slab of cathartic brain-chopping for a change?

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