Today I won’t beat around the bush for long: we’re talking about by far the worst game I’ve ever streamed. Whoever expects a balanced rating with positive and negative points, should go now. You can read here about exactly what makes me so upset about “The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Edition”.

But first a little bit about the background, so you know where I’m coming from. First of all I would like to say that I don’t have a problem with the franchise itself – I watched two episodes of “The Walking Dead”, it wasn’t really my thing, nothing more. I don’t hold any grudge against the story, the characters, the actors – I honestly just didn’t care until now.

What I definitely hate are sloppy implemented video games. I especially have a history with games where “every decision counts” – each of you has heard my rant about “Life Is Strange” at least once. Since the last Telltale game “The Wolf Among Us” stood out very positively, my expectations for “The Walking Dead” were high – even without the background knowledge, it should be a good experience, right?

But now begins the part that is a bit unpleasant. Because to cut a long story short: there isn’t a single aspect of this game that I like. What particularly annoys me is the fact that the developers (or whoever made these decisions) just didn’t seem to care how many points about this game were objectively and obviously bad. I just can’t imagine how something like this could happen with a “Definitive Edition” – apparently it was even looked at a second time.

So let’s start with my favorite topic – subtitles and translations. As always, I left the voice output in English and activated German subtitles. Right from the start, we noticed the incorrect symbols – boxes in the middle of the sentence that appeared in random places. So it was clear – no one had even played the game with subtitles for five minutes to check it out. Not a perfect start, but okay.

Unfortunately, the quality of the subtitles also left a lot to be desired. Although the spelling was consistently correct, the translations were often not only inaccurate, but simply wrong – and sometimes extremely so. In one scene, two characters looked at a house with boarded up windows and one of them talks about how someone “got screwed” – my interpretation is that the English words “fortify and “fornicate” (slang for “having sex”) was confused. This might be funny in some cases, but it happened all the time, so many sentences just didn’t make sense and you always had to listen to the English voices to understand what was going on.

Ah yes, the story – another target of my hatred for this game. In terms of setting, it’s a classic zombie game: we’re adults, we find a child and we take them to where we think their parents are. On the way we meet different people who sometimes help us, sometimes have evil in mind. Of course, we have a dark past that can be our downfall here and there – overall nothing extraordinarily good or bad.

Of course, the decisions we can make are much more interesting. These not only directly influence our actions, but also the opinion that others have of us – a promising mechanic. Unfortunately, this is completely undermined and made obsolete by the fact that it is completely ignored at all important points. While I celebrated “The Wolf Among Us” for the fact that all decisions have an impact even in the final scene, in this game those effects are nil.

In decision-making situations (we decide A but it becomes B) we have this quite often. For example, at one point we have to decide whether we want to leave a woman behind to die or take her with us – but if we decide to take her with us, she will be shot in the very same cutscene because she is not planned to be around any longer. The relationship system is also ignored: we build a close bond with Clementine (the girl we accompany) throughout the game. She trusts us and we keep talking about taking her to her parents – she has no reason not to believe or trust in us.

Oh, plot twist: she’s been hiding from us the whole time that someone strange is talking to her on her radio. Of course she immediately believes this complete stranger and runs away – why wouldn’t she. Although there is a brief conflict among us and her before this point, it seems very forced and doesn’t fit into the rest of the story at all. You immediately notice that the game only knows one direction and simply forces it bluntly if we make the “wrong” decisions. That really disappointed me and, in my opinion, shows that they were just jumping on the hype of this genre without thinking about how to implement it.

It all feels like a story that is far too linear and offers no room for variations – so the decision mechanics don’t work because every decision has to lead to the same result. But even this linear story makes no sense in itself.

This is immediately noticeable in the first 20 to 30 minutes. In these, the protagonist has a car accident, flees to a settlement, finds Clementine and sets off with her – so far, so good. However, in the accident we hurt our leg, and badly so: we can only crawl for the first few meters, then we lean on a rifle. It is always emphasized how much pain we are in.

Shortly afterwards we push a car out of a driveway. Not because fear and pain force us to do so – no one is chasing us at that moment. But because it just has to go there. We put our full weight on our leg without any problems – one can forget about such a deep cut, right? A short time later, when we arrive at a farm, the wound has to be treated straight away and we were limping in huge pain again.

Otherwise, we have the classic elements that make a story really good – people shouting and attracting zombies after telling us two minutes before how quiet we have to be. People simply take the blockade out of a door that dozens of zombies had been banging on seconds before, because no one could have guessed that they would come back (they all probably went to the restrooms for a minute). One of the characters has a heart problem and always decides at exactly the right moments to become absolutely choleric and have a heart attack – although we later come to smash his head with a brick (and not entirely without satisfaction).

But enough of the sarcasm: the story and characters are written to be hated. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a stylistic device or if the series is written just as bluntly, but you’d like to just turn around and continue on your own – it can’t be worse than with the others. Since that’s not possible, I ended up quitting the game after the fourth episode (the part where Clementine runs away) – it just became too much for me.

I won’t say much about the other aspects – it was okay, few bugs, controls worked.

All in all, I can say one thing: I didn’t expect how bad a video game could be. The points I mentioned don’t even cover everything that upset me, but at some point you have to draw a line. But what surprised me most was that the game is rated “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam – I don’t understand that at all, but I don’t even try. I think the points I mentioned are understandable (and if you want to spend the money, also verifiable), so I don’t know how a person would come to a positive rating. But at this point I just don’t care.

What do you think of the game? Can you understand my criticism, do you feel the same way about the game or maybe you think about it completely differently? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!