Some Choices In Games I Like
Narrative choices in video games have been a constant talking point in the medium for as long as I can remember. It’s always been fascinating. When gaming was in its earliest stages, people enjoyed playing as a character and defeating a big, bad villain, because who doesn’t? Shortly after this though, people realised that gaming was an interactive medium, and even books had had interactive elements. Do you remember those choose your own adventure books? Video games had moral choices as early as the 90s in Streets of Rage, when you and your co-op partner could choose at the very end of the campaign whether to band together and fight the villain or fight each other to take on the villain for yourself. It’s such a fun concept. There’s no actual correct answer to that dilemma and it’s also something that you can’t really explore in any other medium. Obviously film and TV have had moral dilemmas but you never get to actually explore either side, you just have to sit and watch what happens on-screen. This leads into my point today, which is half a review and half a discussion on choices in an interactive narrative. This is Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
The Walking Dead, originally a comic series written by Robert Kirkman, is about as standard as a zombie universe is. People were hanging out, and then flesh-eating, shambling monsters appeared and created chaos. These monsters also used to be people. The zombie genre has been explored heavily for decades and there’s been a lot of fascinating ideas presented. Ideas like killing a loved one who has become a monster, or choosing who to give your limited food to during a tough period. It’s a genre ripe with moral dilemmas, and it’s a genre that was ripe with those dilemmas from the very start.
Telltale, then, was the perfect studio to tackle this universe. They had been creating episodic games with a focus on narrative choice for several years, with their biggest hook being their ability to acquire the rights to various popular IPs. They had already made games based on Wallace & Gromit, Back To The Future and Jurassic Park and this constant use of IP would later be one of the downfalls of the studio, but I will save that for a later article. The studio had a hook of mixing big IP’s with interesting narrative choices, and while they had been gaining popularity over the few years they were active, their take on The Walking Dead universe was the big moment for them. Overnight the studio became a major hit. The game received nothing but praise, even being hugely viral before studios knew what being viral was. The game was a success, but why? And why do I think it was a bit too much?
I need to put a preface here before fully exploring what I want to explore, and it’s the obvious. I wish no ill-will towards any developers or writers involved. I just want to discuss what I think, and see if anyone agrees or disagrees. I wish people would do the same for my own writing, because that’s what it means to share your art with the world. Anyway.
Spoiler warning for the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, which has been out for 14 years (oh god I feel old). There’s a character throughout the first season that absolutely sucked, and not in a “oh he’s a villain” kind of way, just in a “he’s badly written” kind of way. You meet a young dude early on, and he’s a huge coward. You’d expect a fairly standard character arc here right? Like he’s a coward, and then later on he does something brave and/or sacrifices himself. It makes sense, and even cliched arcs like that can still be incredibly effective if done right. It wasn’t though. We learn after adding him to our group, that he has been helping nearby bandits to our food supply, and inadvertently killed several of our group in the process. Obviously this wasn’t his plan, but it technically is his fault. That’s a fairly fascinating moral dilemma in itself, because he wasn’t doing anything out of malice but then he did do something very stupid. What would you do here? The game presents the option to kick him out or keep him, since at the end of the day, he is quite a young guy, so it’s tough (on paper). I wonder why it never worked for me then, and why when a rough ending befalls him, I was thankful. I think it comes down to incredibly contrived reasons why he was constantly getting in the way. It makes sense when one character is a burden because he has broken his leg for example, but it doesn’t make sense when this character opens a zombie infested room because he wanted the crowbar that was holding the door shut. He just wanted a weapon, even though he had one earlier in the episode, and subsequently the door is thrown open and now the entire group is in peril, all because of very lazy writing.
It’s tough in a universe such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead to create an actual sense of urgency. All of the zombies are incredibly slow and stupid, so the writers need to come up with ways to add tension and drama. The best way the writers did this is to just forgo the zombies and make it all about the human drama. One of the most memorable bits early on in the season is when you stumble upon a farmhouse with some survivors, and they are all incredibly hospitable, even laying out a full meal for you and your group, only for it to be revealed that the meal consists of human meat. It’s a terrifying moment, probably being the single scariest moment of the entire game.
I think back to the really annoying character, and how it ended up that way. Writers should often look at the broader strokes of a story, and think whether they connect with certain characters or not. It must be harder when your story has multiple branching paths, because maybe all the choices I made were choices that some of the writers didn’t choose. A big writers room is already a tough thing to navigate, let alone one that writes a branching narrative style game. I think the writers didn’t realise, from the broader strokes, that this annoying character just added nothing to the story but hindrances. The only character trait that worked in his favour was the fact that he was a young man, so we had some empathy for him navigating a tricky world. It doesn’t help when the choice is between a stupid child or a capable adult, because, on paper, that’s a decent moral dilemma. You want a stronger group to survive the apocalypse but naturally people are empathetic towards the younger generation, but this younger character was so just poorly written. I think I simply didn’t like him as a person, which might be a tough thing to say.
A good moral choice is an interesting thing to discuss, and it seems simple when laid out in front of you. Present a choice, where both options seem entirely viable, and there you have a good moral choice. A lot of games have them, with notable ones being big single-player RPGs like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the Mass Effect trilogy, but I will use the last part of this ramble to bring up an underrated and fantastic gem that released in the summer of 2025 titled ‘The Alters’.
The entire game revolves around being stranded on an alien planet with essentially nothing but a 3D printer that can print clones of yourself. You have to clone yourself to then get resources to further progress towards the end goal of returning home. It’s a truly brilliant concept that revolves entirely around a dubious moral dilemma. I think the reason it works so well is that, when you clone yourself, the clones all have varying opinions and thought processes behind what you just did. Some don’t entirely care and are just happy to be alive, while some actively despise you and what you did. It is all superbly well written, and it lacks any actual contrivances for the sake of the plot. That might be where Telltale’s The Walking Dead falters. It feels, at times, as though the plot was more of a concern than the characters, when realistically it should be the other way around. The characters should all make decisions, whether rational or irrational, that drive the plot forward. It can feel quite clear and obvious when someone is writing with the kind of mindset of “this needs to happen, so if character A does this then it will mean it happens.”
Like usual, I have no idea how to end this. I just wanted an excuse to discuss some things I’ve noticed recently in some games that I enjoy. If there’s anything you disagree with then please get in contact. I love rambling about my interests, clearly.
Thanks for reading.
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