Walking Dead, The - A Telltale Games Series (Europe)
Xbox 360
🇬🇧
Reviewed in 2013
89
✪ Reviewed on March 28, 2025
88
Telltale write a devastating five-episode season in which Lee Everett protects young Clementine during the zombie apocalypse. The moral choice writing hits dead centre, companions stay unforgettable, and the 360 receives here probably the most emotional narrative adventure Telltale ever penned.
Your verdict
Category
Adventure1 player18+
Description
Episodic adventure by Telltale Games, May 2013. Lee Everett and little Clementine cross zombie-invaded American Georgia making heart-wrenching moral decisions each episode. Choice system affecting narrative and character relationships, TV series atmosphere and intense emotional narrative. Complete five-episode Season 1 version, acclaimed as one of the finest narrative games.
Walking Dead, The - A Telltale Games Series review
4/5
Art direction
★★★★★
"Striking"
4/5
Music
★★★★★
"Excellent"
MAX
Story
★★★★★
"Masterful"
Most of the game happens in the faces. Telltale concentrates its animation on brows, jaws, eyes that slide away, and frames dialogue as television shot-reverse-shot. Lee and Clementine read each other on screen, and the player learns to watch for a flicker of an eyelid like a clue. Few games make close-ups their true action scenes.
Clementine's motif is the score's true backbone: a few fragile notes, almost a music box, returning at every lull around the girl. Episode after episode, Jared Emerson-Johnson strips it down, removing instruments as the world loses its own, until it stands bare in the finale. You can follow the whole season through the wear of that single theme.
At the heart of a zombie apocalypse, a man with a murky past watches over a little girl he learns to protect as his own. A choice-driven tale of rare emotional force, it makes human relationships, not the undead, its true stakes. Its harrowing ending redefined what a narrative game could be.
Gameplay
"Solid"
Fun
"Pleasant"
Addictiveness
"Obsessive"
Settling wrenching dilemmas where each choice bears on what follows turns this narrative adventure into a tale whose outcome you absolutely want to know, episode after episode. The relationships that form and break pull the story forward. Its interactivity stays limited, but the strength of its writing and its characters makes every episode's end hard to leave.
The Walking Dead A Telltale Games Series, a Telltale choice-driven narrative adventure that moved players through its writing and the bond between Lee and Clementine, a milestone of interactive storytelling. Still common, its desirability rests on this status as a striking emotional work rather than scarcity, the Game of the Year edition being preferred for its content. A prime piece for fans of interactive narratives on the console.
Is Walking Dead, The - A Telltale Games Series still worth playing in 2026?
Released in 2012 on Xbox 360, Telltale Games' The Walking Dead redefined the narrative adventure game and shook players, following Lee and young Clementine in a zombie apocalypse where the human matters more than the horror. The choice system, where every decision under pressure shapes relationships and the story, creates an emotional charge of rare intensity. The masterful character writing reaches its peak toward a heartbreaking finale. The action stays minimal, in service of the story. But the story is unforgettable. For fans of narrative games and emotion, this masterpiece keeps an immense value today.
