Now that Halloween is coming up, it's zombie time. Last year, I took a peek at the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. Thanks to Humble Bundles, I got some more at the same time as the others. This is more of the same.

The gameplay is the standard Telltale fare. You make choices. You click dialog options. You press keys to activate quicktime events. People remember things, but most of those things don't seem to matter. The story somehow manages to make most of your choices not matter much. At this point in the series, the zombies are merely decorations (albeit dangerous decorations) in the backdrop.

The story is what this game sells, so I won't spoil it (much). You play as Clementine, the girl from the first series. You start off journeying with a pregnant couple (also from the first series). The boyfriend gets killed in the opening scene, and the pregnant woman disappears and is never heard from again. You meet up with some escapees from a sociopath's dictatorship, and decide to head north. (The last season took place in Georgia, so I guess this is somewhere in the Carolinas or Virginias? It's never explicitly mentioned.) When someone follows you for 100 miles at great expense to them, there's something seriously wrong with them.

Then there's the Michonne spinoff. No characters from the previous seasons appear. You play as Michonne, who comes off as some sort of pirate queen. She and her crew stumble across another sociopath's dictatorship flotilla, and she deals with the ghosts of her past while getting out.

Graphics and sound are decent enough to get the job done. There's many areas where there are zombie sounds coming from behind a door, but you don't see any. I'm sure that's on purpose to creep you out, but the sound is coming from further in. Animations are a bit bugged: if you have keen enough eyes, you sometimes spot characters jumping around in the first frame after camera angle changes.

I'm not that enthusiastic about these, and I'm doubtful that I'll enjoy later installments, nor am I looking forward to them. (I don't have any more.) They don't push things. The gameplay is identical, and the story ultimately doesn't raise the stakes. I played these to check the box. I'm posting this to end my daze and escape mediocrity.