I feel like starting a new blog series, one where I discuss games that I personally find to be very overrated. I will start that now!

Telltale's The Walking Dead was released to extremely high critical acclaim back in 2012. It one several awards, including the prestigious Game of the Year award. Even I enjoyed it back then and I cried at the ending of season 1. Looking back, however, when I think of this entire series in retrospect, I feel a much different tone towards it. That being that the series is actually pretty bad and incredibly overrated.

Let me explain. The Walking Dead has a decent premise, but one that isn't wholly unique. You control a single character, go through events, make decisions that 'alter' the story and that is basically it. Simple enough. Sound familiar? Yeah, Heavy Rain did this first. And while Heavy Rain has a lot of problems, I feel it did its concept far better than TWD did.

While the writing itself isn't great (Many characters are one note) and the game engine has all sorts of issues despite this barely being a game at all, I will go ahead and delve into the game's most massive problem and why I don't like Telltale games at all anymore. Spoilers ahead from here, so you are warned.

Your choices don't matter.

They simply don't. YES, they can make other characters treat you differently in a moment-to-moment basis, as well as making your character into more of an asshole or a nice guy, but none of this does what the game advertises at the start of every episode: Alter the story. Every major decision you make will always be thrown out the window in one form or another.

Take this for example: When you are on Hershel's farm near the beginning of episode 1 of the entire series, you are given the first major choice in the entire game: Do you save Duck, who is the son of Kenny or do you save Shawn, the son of Hershel? Oh shit! The stakes are high! How can I possibly make such a hugely polarizing decision-OH WAIT, it doesn't matter who you pick, because Shawn ALWAYS dies no matter what. The only difference is that if you 'save' Shawn, Hershel shows some respect to you and Kenny is angry with you. Awesome. So I got the respect of a character I will never see again and now the character I will be stuck with for most of the time hates me. Why was I even given a choice?! Keep in mind that if you don't do everything good for Kenny, then he will hate you. Yay, awesome. I love the illusion of choice. /s

Here is another example: Near the end of episode 1 in season 1, you come to yet another choice of 'saving' someone. This time though, it actually isn't flat out lying to you! If you save one person, the other one does die. Okay, you have my attention. I look forward to developing a deeper friendship with this important character that I personally decided to save-OOOOOOOH WAIT AGAIN! It doesn't matter who you save. In episode 3, no matter what you do, the character you saved is shot and killed by another character. There is no choice, no decision to be made, they are simply killed off without a moment's notice regardless of what you do. I know that the argument could be made that this matches the overall theme of the Walking Dead, you never know who could die, but considering this is a game that straight up thrusts in your face 'Your choices alter the story', it comes across as moronic and cheap.

To top all of this off, at the end of season 1, Lee, the character you play as and have made all of these oh so important decisions with, dies. Yes, he dies. This actually is a very emotional moment that I do give some credit for, but after I wipe the tears away and think about it, I realize, this invalidates EVERYTHING in season 1. The only things that carry over are how some characters talk about you in season 2, that's it. You play as a totally different character in season 2 and season 2 suffers from the EXACT same problems as season 1. Hell, you can actually get multiple endings in season 2, which is so surprising to me, but then season 3 jumps in time by like 5 years so once again, everything is invalidated. There are many other examples of characters that you can either let live or die, but it doesn't matter because they die anyways eventually no matter what.

The Walking Dead by Telltale is already barely a video game as it is. The stakes are never really high, it is extremely linear and there isn't much to do except go through the motions to get the story. So when Telltale constantly advertises that your choices truly alter how the story plays out and it actually doesn't, at all, I find that incredibly insulting. Once you take that away, you are left with a bare minimum 'video game'. Even Heavy Rain has 16 different endings you can get! 16!!! And this 'game', you basically only get 1, except in season 2, where you can get like, 5, but all of them are invalidated anyways. This same problem plagues every single Telltale title too, so there is no escaping it. If they want to make a story like this, then make it into an animated Netflix series or something, not this cookie-cutter point and click game with fake choices.

That is why I think The Walking Dead by Telltale is overrated. It didn't deserve to win Game of the Year for 2012, especially when it is barely a game to begin with.