The Walking Dead Hits PSN Wednesday

Telltale Games is set to unleash the The Walking Dead on Wednesday on the PlayStation Network. The game is based on the five part episodic series based on Robert Kirkman’s Eisner comic book series, The Walking Dead.

The first episode will hit PSN on Wednesday and will cost £3.99 on the PlayStation Store. The entire season will be available for £15.99 and include an exclusive PS3 theme.

Unlike Back to the Future: The Game, The Walking Dead is a darker turn for Telltale Games. The gameplay is different in comparison to their other titles.

‘Jake’ from Telltale explained as such;

”One major way that the game differs from previous Telltale offerings is that your decisions, through action and dialog that you choose, will have huge repercussions on how you experience the story of the game.”

The game will be featured on the comics solely, not the TV series that it spawned. More about the characters and locations can be discovered through playing the game; it gives a better understanding of the comic series.

Telltale states;

”Fans of Glenn will get to know his back-story before he heads to Atlanta. And, for a certain character in particular (one who goes on to have a huge impact on Rick Grimes’ life) you’ll get an understanding of what drove them to become the person you’ll see in the comics.”

The game does not follow Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes though, the game tells the story of a new character – Lee Everett – who exists in the same world and roughly the same geographical location as Rick. In terms of comic book timeline, the story begins when Rick is still in a coma.

A new story was decided on by  Telltale and Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead. It was decided upon telling a new story as Rick’s may become stale and predictable.

Telltale explain;

”A new story, with a new lead character, means that we’re free to create new and exciting scenarios and that we can add to the back-story of characters and locations seen in the comics.”

Players will play as Lee Everett who has been sentenced to a life in prison for killing a man who was involved with his wife. As the story develops, you can choose if he is a cold-blooded killer or morally justified.

Telltale have revealed;

”The zombies in our game are not just fleshy targets for your high-powered weapon, and you might be forced to finish someone who was a friend or a relative before they turned. On top of that, resources in our world are limited and noise attracts the wrong kind of attention, so you’ll have to get up close and use hand tools and weapons. We want people who think they’re desensitized to zombie violence to find that, in truth, they’re not.”

This makes this not your average shooter.

Following the increasing trend, Telltale let players decide the fate of the story based on their own decisions. They continue;

”Your decisions or actions might have an effect in the episode you’re playing or might affect the entire season. You could answer a question in a certain way and have a character become suspicious of your motives, or you could be forced to choose who to save when two people are in mortal peril but only one can be yanked back from the zombie horde. Your decisions will stay with you throughout the series, and their repercussions could mean that you and a friend have a very different game experience. Writing for a game with content that “branches” in this way certainly has its challenges. Instead of a normal linear script, we have to take into account each possible branch and how it affects the game you’ll play. It’ll be fun to backtrack when playing to see what would happen if you’d made a different decision and our save system supports that with our rewind feature.”