Today is Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, so naturally there will be a lot of ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and annoying kids running in the middle of the street. It’s also a time for one of my favorite creatures of the night: zombies. As it turns out, the team at TellTale Games also released a teaser trailer for Season 2 of their Walking Dead game this past Tuesday. Since I know I’m not the only one with zombies on my brain today, I decided to review The Walking Dead: 400 Days.

Please be aware that there are minor spoilers in this review, so don’t read any further if you haven’t played the game yet and plan too.

The Walking Dead: 400 Days is the bridge between season 1 and season 2 of the series. Instead of focusing on the people in season 1, like Clementine, this installment follows five very different people and their personal stories in The Walking Dead universe. Each person’s photograph is displayed on a bulletin board, and you click on their faces to begin each of their stories. You will be able to explore an abandoned gas station with some not-so-friendly occupants, to a corn field where you must hide from those who would eat you. The stories are impactful and has some of the best writing I have seen in a video game recently.

As you progress through the game, you will be faced with some pretty hard choices. These choices will affect the story and the way characters act, especially during the last scene, when we eventually find out that all of these people have formed a group together and a certain person wants to break up this group. Let’s just say that I had two of the five leave the group, and I wasn’t too sure that I had made the right decisions along the way. Since choices are carried over to the next episode, it will be interesting to see what the characters will do in season 2.

But that is the beauty of these Walking Dead games. There isn’t really a right or wrong way to play them, and they never disappoint in terms of awesome storytelling. Sure, your decisions might end up getting one of the characters killed, but the story doesn’t stop there.

I love the The Walking Dead and I love TellTale for crafting these amazing stories for us. I can’t wait for season 2 to start so I can see the outcomes of my choices and how they might affect my dear, sweet Clementine.

I give The Walking Dead: 400 Days a 9 out of 10.

About the author

Corey Kirk

Gaming enthusiast. Great at many, master of none.

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400 Days is a continuation of Telltale‘s The Walking Dead game, and serves as a prequel of sorts for the upcoming second season. The story runs parallel to both the first five episodes of the game (Season One) and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comics, but introduces 5 new protagonists.

Top Left to Bottom Right: Wyatt, Shel, Russel, Vince, Bonnie

400 Days tells five linked stories, each centered around an abandoned truck stop on a desolate Georgia highway. Each story takes place at different points in time and from the point of view of a new survivor, from the first day of the zombie apocalypse to day 400.

As you choose which character you want to play as (don’t worry, you will get a chance at all of them), you get to see how each story overlaps with the others, and even see locations and characters from season one.

It is the same point and click adventure type game that Telltale loves, and still lends itself well to the story telling in the game. There are less dialogue options, or choices that actively matter in the game. Any important decisions basically boil down to the last 5 minutes of that particular story. You won’t get to stop the outcome of the stories, but you will help dictate if these people will appear in the next season.

Since the game is smaller than previous entries, it runs without the hiccups previous episodes had. It runs smoothly, and even has better facial animations.

Fortunately, despite the length, the stories still are emotionally gripping. Even spending 15 minutes with some characters makes you desperately want to see how their stories continue. Characters have depth despite short screen time, and even rival the character complexities Clementine and Lee had.

Some small caveats, there is a decision in one of the stories that seems completely arbitrary, but is a huge deciding factor on whether the character will appear again. It gave you little to no reason why which choice was better than the other, but still levies a huge penalty on you for choosing the “wrong” one.

Other issues that may bother people are the lack of meaningful choices. Sure, you might have overlap from one to the next, but for the most part they are extremely linear. There is a lack of danger which  combined with the “non choices” makes this episode seem more like an interactive movie than a video game.

People might complain short length of the game (which clocks in at about 2 hours), but for $5 (or cheaper on Steam’s summer sale), it is definitely worth it. The characters and stories will get you excited and ready for next season and leaves you with a hell of a cliff hanger.

About the author

Lui Galletto

If you are reading this, I have been kidnapped. They are forcing me to play video games against my will. Send help

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