Review: The Walking Dead Episode 2: Starved For Help

Review by Daniel Nenadovic

Last week on my own personal blog, Geek Media Musings, I reviewed Telltale's The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day and found the game to be refreshingly good after the release of their incredibly disappointing Jurassic Park game. The Walking Dead was more of a talky decisions game than a zombie action one, but I appreciated that considering the gravity surrounding those decisions. Life and death were in your hands, and your choices were usually sacrificing one person or resource to save another.

While Episode 1 was about surviving the initial impact of a zombie event, Episode 2 picks up three months after the first and your group seems to have settled into some sort of relatively-safe life in a barricaded motel. Except that you're running out of food. The gang has been on strict rations, and everybody is hungry. In fact, today it's your job to distribute the last few pieces of food to the group, but you don't have nearly enough to feed everybody.

So who do you feed? Perhaps more important, through your decisions, who don't you feed?

These are the moments where Telltale's game shines. There are no obvious answers, no real sense of right or wrong. Every last person in your camp is starving and each deserves food. The old man, the hunting buddy, the children, the markswoman, the guy who always has your back, and all the others. Who you feed now may have consequences later today. I applied a simple moral code that I carry in the real world: children first, elderly second, women, and then men. So some of the women and all of the fit men in my group went hungry that day, despite the fact that said fit men were pulling the most weight by way of their bodies being the most useful tools.

Others might approach that situation entirely different, and while I might believe them morally wrong in some way if they starved the children or something, the game isn't going to say that they've made the wrong decision, and indeed, their groups may fare better than mine did in a practical sense.

While zombies are present in Episode 2: Starved for Help, the meat of this particular episode is the question of how you treat your fellow human beings during dire situations. This question is implied in almost every decision you make this time around, and they are some heavy decisions.

As I said in my review of Episode 1, my hope was that Telltale would continue to provide the player with interesting and heavy decisions, and instead Starved for Help considerably improves that aspect of the game with consistent tension and weight. On the technical side of things, the game's audio sounded better than Episode I and its visuals looked just as good.

My one quibble comes with some of the action events that pop up from time to time. They're carried out through simple QTE and are not hard to achieve, but they can jump up on you when you settle into the slow and talky pace of the game. In particular, one of them took me completely by surprise this round and I was faced with an instant reload. While these can be fun and their presence keeps tension together, they are often inconsistent with the pace of the rest of the game. Luckily, failing them never punishes you too badly as the game will simply reload you to just before the action event that lead to your death in the first place. But then, that itself can also break atmosphere and tone. 

Still, that's a small problem in light of everything that The Walking Dead Game does right. If you're looking for a game set in the post-apoc setting that hinges upon big decisions with no shoe-horned correct answer, I really can't recommend this enough. I already regret some of the decisions that I made, and these are decisions that I made in a video game. That said video game can move me so speaks volumes to its quality.

The Walking Dead Telltale Game Series is available for purchase as the entire season on Steam and through Telltale's site for PC, but keep in mind that you're buying the whole season without immediate access to the last three episodes of said season, each of which will release individually over the next few months. If you'd like to purchase the game on an episode-by-episode basis, I believe that those are available for console on the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PSN Store.