I love point and click adventures. One of my earliest memories of playing games was The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga, and ever since I've been hooked on the combination of sharp dialogue and borderline nonsensical puzzles. The Walking Dead has some of the best writing of any game I've played, but the puzzle solving can be a bit pedestrian by comparison.
Episode 3 opens with a chunk of what this game does best: it takes two characters who already hate each other, then has both of them piss you off right before you have to pick a side. Lilly is growing more and more paranoid, and Kenny is using it to push his plan to get the hell out of the motel. This leads into a fairly dull bit of investigation, but the game seems to realise this and pretty quickly has a bunch of bandits kick the door in.
Now, I'm one of those freaks who can't aim without inverted mouse controls, so of course I managed to make a total pig's ear of the fight. Thirty second later, we're all piling into the RV and abandoning the motel to a swarm of walkers, attracted by the gunfire.
This leads into my favourite section of the whole episode, as Lilly starts to lose it completely, and we're forced to stop by the roadside to scrape a walker of the bottom of the van. Some excellent camera work really ramps up the tension, making sure we're don't know who is going to snap until the moment before it happens. Things escalate fast, and with each set piece our group gets smaller and smaller.
Speaking of set pieces, this game remains a master of them. Getting the train up and running left me with a glow of satisfaction, which of course meant that I was about a minute away from being asked to shoot a child in the head. Oh Walking Dead, don't ever change.
The episode wraps up with the striking image of a jackknifed petrol tanker hanging off a bridge and blocking the path of the train. This looks so good that I can almost let them off one of the worst fire effects I've seen, when the whole thing inevitably goes up in flames.
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