The Walking Dead: A New Frontier

Easily the best Walking Dead game so far, for my money. A New Frontier feels like the work of a writing team who've taken a step back and really thought about both the series and about Telltale's output as a whole, carefully considered what works and what doesn't, and found themselves a renewed focus and vigor to work with.

Or maybe they just looked at one of their previous games - the best one. The tone and feeling of Game of Thrones hangs heavy over this, because this manages to recapture exactly what made the hours I spent with House Forrester so special; both games make you feel completely and utterly powerless. In a medium largely held up by power fantasies, it's very hard to articulate - especially to people who don't play games much - just how effective that is, just how deep a game can get under your skin by sending you into a situation with the best intentions and then making you watch just how badly you've fucked it up, or better yet, how badly somebody else is about to fuck it up for you and how little you can do to stop it. There is no way to come out of this world without innocent blood on your hands, no way to walk away saying you didn't completely fuck somebody over at some point. (Guilt, of course, is where video game narratives excel over and above any other medium; it's kind of incredible that we still don't see this exploited more often).

That's the most important reason this is the finest of the four games Telltale has made based on this IP, but there are two other crucial points too. Another is that death feels more important, and human life feels more precious, than it ever has before. This, again, is possibly something learned from Game of Thrones. I haven't seen an awful lot of the TV show, but I have spent a lot of time listening to people talk about it, and the impression I've come away with that is the entire push and pull of the plot revolves around major characters dying; honestly, it's all anybody seems to talk about. That was certainly the case with the game, which felt like a major escalation on previous Telltale titles in terms of just how hard the deaths hit. A New Frontier maintains those standards, with two of the deaths in particular real punches in the gut - firstly Mariana's, which comes out of absolutely nowhere and sets the tone for a lot of the story to follow, and secondly either Tripp or Ava, which almost feels like a parody of Telltale choices in its setup before pulling the rug out from under you. Characters are also properly mourned - at one point I ended up holding a funeral for one of them- and missed, with each further loss feeling like it has a tangible, direct impact on the character development of those who remain. It not like that has been absent from the previous games, of course, but it does feel like it's taken to a new level here.

The last point is the elephant in the room for Telltale games: choice. Or, to be more accurate, the illusion of choice. The idea that the choices you make don't ultimately matter has been the most common complaint with Telltale's games ever since they first started gaining traction in the mainstream - but it's a complaint I've always felt misses the point a little. For me, whether or not the choices matter isn't even nearly as important as whether you think they matter. The game's job isn't to give you a world with dozens of possibilities, it's to leave you believing that those possibilities are there, to make you feel like what you're doing has a major impact on proceedings.