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Out of all the games I've played, this must be the least I played.
Experiencing the first season of Game of Thrones in video game format is more about watching, plotting,
and anticipating what might happen. Most of your work never leaves the mind.
You can do little but pay close attention to the narrative stream, and respond
to the on-screen prompts. Interaction happens through a minimum of
button-presses, and since your decisions are time-restricted, you have little
time to consider the consequences.
If Telltale Games wants to convey the mental stress of partaking in the
HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones, they succeed. Too bad it's technically
impaired, with certain lines of dialogue not playing, stiff animations and
some horrible delays, as if I was streaming it online. Their engine feels
antiquated, and the production feels rushed. Most of the six episodes even end
muted, with no score to accompany the closing credits.
Since this is my first Telltale game, I don't know if I just described their
entire catalogue. If I did, I guess the proper way to review their games would be to
solely judge the writing. However, I don't know this yet, and until I get used
to their formula, I'll have to let their Game of Thrones take the brunt of my
engine issues.
Game of Thrones has good writing - for a game. The problem is that
it follows its source material very closely. This makes comparisons to the
show unavoidable, and of course this story suffers for it. Telltale's writers
do not hide their expositions well enough, which makes some plot developments
a little obvious. You comically often get to make promises - swear to kill someone,
keep a secret, etc. - only to be tempted to break that promise sooner or later.
This happened a lot in the show as well, but it took place off-camera, and the
impact of the betrayals made for some of the best scenes in TV history. Still,
the writing is surprisingly good when it comes to dialogue, bringing forth the
nuances of the character personalities. I particularly enjoy the scenes in
King's Landing, which best capture the spirit of the show.
This season starts off and ends very strong, but the middle is a slog that almost made me quit playing. The six
chapters follow House Forrester of Ironrath, made up specifically for the
game, who are aptly named after their expertise in tending to the ironwood of
the North. They are House Stark loyalists, and the beginning takes us right
outside The Twins, where the infamous Red Wedding is about to take place.
In fact, the Forrester storyline takes place parallell with the events of the
TV show, and some of them influence the story of this game. I'd imagine anyone
unfamiliar with the source material feeling mighty confused by the lore and
constant namedropping. A lot of people and places are mentioned but never
seen, and would mean little to newcomers. However, for show veterans, this is
some intriguing stuff.
Gregor Forrester, the patriarch of the family, dies in the dramatic prologue
without a clear heir to the Ironrath throne, which leaves the house in
shambles. His children are either too young, too female or too far away. Also,
one of their squires, the playable Gared Tuttle (Robin Atkin Downes),
kills some men of House Bolton in self-defense and is sent off north to The
Wall to escape punishment. This causes a political crisis between the
Forresters and the Boltons, which becomes the conflict that drives the story.
It soon becomes apparent that the ties between the game and TV show make the
Forresters mirror the fate of the Starks. Some of the characters line up just
all too well, with Mira Forrester (Martha Mackintosh) being like a carbon
copy of Sansa Stark in the capital, King's Landing. Other player-controllable
characters include Rodrik (Russ Bain), who is gravely wounded and
unable to walk unsupported, Ethan (Christopher Nelson), the young sir
who must step up to the occasion, and Asher (Alex Jordan), an exiled
young man currently living as a sellsword in Essos. The latter is the most
free-spirited and original, whereas the other ones seems cut from the same
northern cloth.
With the characters spread out across the Seven kingdoms and beyond, we get a
nice variation in scenery and a lot of different subplots to consider. The
characters are well acted, and a selection of the TV show's cast lend their
talents to their respective characters. These include Tyrion and Cersei
Lannister (Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey, respectively), Jon
Snow (Kit Harington), Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), Margaery
Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke).
The writers capture their personalities well, particularly Tyrion and Margaery,
who are given more screentime than the others. And the actors... well, at
least they don't sound bored.
Their models look fine in screenshots but the way they're animated make them
cross over into the uncanny valley. Telltale obviously could not afford to
invest in advanced motion capture, so the characters move like stiff action figures,
reminiscent of animated cutscenes from the 1990:s. Above all, this hurts the
fighting scenes, which look laughable. It makes me think that maybe stills
would have been better. Such a presentation would at least have allowed players to use
their imagination to fill in the blanks.
Since the story is told mostly through fixed cutscenes and dialogue options,
you can choose how to behave and test your reflexes in a few quick-time
events. If you fail an action sequence you get a creative Game Over-screen
reading "Valar Morghulis" or something fitting, but unfortunately, you can do
little to alter the story's outcome. Just out of curiosity I tried to replay a
few scenes, choosing totally different conversational options, and found them
to end up the same in every crucial way. One scene just felt a little more
shoehorned than the other.
And talk about shoehorned: At the end of chapter three, I had to face a guy who
had murdered my character's family. I had sworn my superiors not to fight the
guy, and tried to talk him out of it. He still attacked, and when I defended
myself I always chose the least deadly option, but he nevertheless died. Come
the start of the next chapter, the story summary retrofitted my choices,
showing my character running his sword through the enemy's chest in cold blood.
However, the few choices that really matter are impactful and
upsetting. Coming close to the end, they heighten the tension and my overall
view of the game, and would have made a huge impact on the next season - or so
it seems. Unfortunately, we'll probably never know. Telltale took too long
to produce the next season, then they went bankrupt, and then they got
revived. But now it's overdue. The TV show is over and the momentum is lost.
The show's actors have become megastars and are probably unaffordable.
Most likely we'll never see how it ends, unless you consider this eternal
cliffhanger a satisfactory conclusion the the Forrester saga. At least I know I don't.
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