Game of Thrones (2014, Playstation 4) Review

CHOOSE YOUR OWN CHOICE

Also for: Macintosh, Playstation 3, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One

Out of all the games I’ve played, this must be the one I played the least. Experiencing the first season of Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series is less about playing and more about watching, plotting, and anticipating consequences. Most of the work never leaves your mind. You are asked to follow the narrative closely and respond to on-screen prompts, nothing more. Interaction is reduced to minimal button presses and slow movement, and since decisions are time-restricted, you’re rarely given the luxury of considering their long-term effects.

If Telltale Games set out to convey the mental strain of participating in the Game of Thrones universe, they largely succeed. Unfortunately, the illusion is undercut by technical shortcomings. Dialogue lines sometimes fail to trigger, animations are stiff, and input delays are so severe they make the experience feel like a poorly buffered stream. The engine feels antiquated, and the production rushed. Most of the six episodes even end in silence, with no music accompanying the closing credits.

Since this is my first Telltale game, I can’t tell whether these issues are unique to this title or endemic to their entire catalogue. If they are representative, then perhaps the only fair way to judge these games is by their writing alone. But until I grow accustomed to their formula, Game of Thrones must bear the full weight of my frustration with the technology.

To its credit, Game of Thrones is well written—for a game. Its main problem is how closely it shadows its source material. Comparisons to the TV series are unavoidable, and the game inevitably comes up short. Exposition is often clumsily delivered, making plot developments easy to predict. You are comically often asked to swear oaths—promising to kill someone, keep a secret, or remain loyal—only to be tempted to break them shortly thereafter.

This structure existed in the show as well, but there the betrayal build-up usually happened off-screen, with devastating emotional payoff. Still, the game’s dialogue is surprisingly strong, capturing the nuances of character personalities with care. The scenes set in King’s Landing are particularly effective, best evoking the show’s political intrigue and moral rot.

The season opens and closes on a high note, but the middle chapters are a slog that nearly made me quit altogether. The six episodes follow House Forrester of Ironrath, a noble family created specifically for the game. As loyalists to House Stark, their story begins just outside the Twins on the eve of the infamous Red Wedding.

The Forrester narrative runs parallel to events from the show, occasionally intersecting with them. For players unfamiliar with the source material, this must be utterly bewildering. Names, places, and political factions are constantly referenced but rarely explained or shown. For veterans of the series, however, this interwoven storytelling is genuinely compelling.

The family patriarch, Gregor Forrester, is killed in the prologue, leaving no clear heir and throwing the house into chaos. His children are either too young, too distant, or too politically inconvenient to rule. Meanwhile, Gared Tuttle (voiced by Robin Atkin Downes), a Forrester squire and playable character, kills several men of House Bolton in self-defense and is sent to the Wall to escape retribution. This incident sparks a political conflict with the Boltons that drives much of the plot.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the Forresters are deliberately positioned as mirrors of the Starks. Some parallels are almost too neat. Mira Forrester (played by Martha Mackintosh) is essentially a stand-in for Sansa Stark in King’s Landing. Other playable characters include Rodrik (Russ Bain), gravely wounded and struggling to lead; Ethan (Christopher Nelson), a child forced into authority; and Asher (Alex Jordan), an exiled sellsword surviving in Essos. Asher stands out as the most free-spirited and original of the bunch, while the others feel cut from the same Northern cloth.

With characters scattered across Westeros and beyond, the game offers welcome variation in both scenery and subplots. Performances are generally strong, bolstered by appearances from the TV show’s cast: Tyrion and Cersei Lannister (voiced by Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey), Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke). Tyrion and Margaery fare best, given more screen time and sharper writing. And while the performances aren’t remarkable, at least the actors don’t sound disengaged.

Visually, the character models look acceptable in stills, but animation pushes them straight into the uncanny valley. Lacking advanced motion capture, Telltale’s characters move like stiff action figures, reminiscent of 1990s-era cutscenes. This is especially damaging during combat scenes, which border on the absurd. At times I wished the game had used static images instead—at least then imagination could have filled in the gaps.

Because the story unfolds almost entirely through cutscenes and dialogue trees, player agency is limited to conversational tone and occasional quick-time events. Failure results in a thematically appropriate “Valar Morghulis” game-over screen, but meaningful divergence is rare. Out of curiosity, I replayed several scenes with radically different choices, only to find that they converged on the same outcomes. One version simply felt more awkwardly forced than the other.

The illusion completely collapses near the end of episode three. I faced a man responsible for murdering my character’s family. I had sworn not to kill him, attempted to de-escalate the situation, and consistently chose the least lethal responses. He still died. Worse, the following episode’s recap rewrote my actions entirely, depicting my character executing him in cold blood. My choices were not just ignored—they were overwritten.

That said, the few decisions that do matter are powerful. Near the finale, they raise the emotional stakes considerably and retroactively improve my view of the season. They clearly set the stage for a continuation that might have paid off beautifully. Unfortunately, that continuation may never arrive. Telltale took too long to produce a second season, then collapsed, then resurfaced. By now, the TV series has ended, the momentum is gone, and its actors are likely far beyond the game’s budget. Most likely, the Forrester story will remain unresolved. Unless you consider an eternal cliffhanger a fitting conclusion, neither do I.