[gameinfo title=”Game Info” game_name=”” developers=”Telltale Games” publishers=”Telltale Games” platforms=”” genres=”” release_date=”August 28, 2012″]
Home has so many connotations in The Walking Dead episodic series. The survivors are all homeless in the best sense of the word. Zombies have driven them to hold up in an old motel but that’s not really “Home”. Home can’t be a place that you have to be prepared to ditch at any minute that trouble comes. Maybe Home is an end goal for the survivors, a place to find safety or family. It appears Savannah might be that place as Kenny is trying to get to the coast and Clementine’s parents were last heard of in Savannah. The road to home is long indeed as episode 3 is a transition piece from the motel to the road.
The Long Road Home is the middle episode of series and is set to transition the survivors from Macon to Savannah. It covers a lot of ground and big plot points happen as quickly as the scenes shift. Unfortunately all of the action in this episode does not leave much room for character building, one of the high points for the series so far. What it does leave room for is character destruction as we get to see more than one survivor reach their breaking points. Episode 3 is also a chance for Lee to come clean about his past with those that he trusts. Relationships, lives, and sanity are all at stake.
As expected, gameplay has not changed between episodes. Lee still walks slow as molasses and interacts with items with a cross-shaped cursor. Highlight something and hit the appropriate button to interact with it. Voice acting is still top-notch and one of the highlights of the episode is the interactions between Duck and Lee during the second chapter. Lee’s aggravation is apparent and Duck pushes his buttons in such a way that you can’t hate the kid.
As mentioned, big plot points happen and while exciting, leads to a bit of disappointment in not having any real influence in them. People will die no matter your actions. Dialogue leads you to believe that maybe if you argued another way you could have saved them but this is the not the case. So far the consequences of your choices have not had a huge impact on the series outside of the dialogue and how a couple of scenes played out.
The Long Road Home suffered from some interesting technical glitches such as having to restart from an autosave because the camera dropped below the world after exiting a door. A look in the forums finds that many others experienced strangeness with the camera and character models going Hollow Man. One would think that issues like this would not crop up in later episodes if they hadn’t been in the first two but apparently that is not the case.
Score: 8/10
The Long Road Home serves the purpose of moving our group of survivors towards the end and not so much home. While it is interesting to see the boiling points reached for so many characters tenuous relationships, the player isn’t given the time to consider the implications of the breakdowns of the group before being shuttled to the next scene. Add in the fact that you almost feel helpless as everyone blows up around you as a player and a character. You can’t save the survivors from themselves and can leave on to wonder if this was intentional or not by Telltale.
