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There's a deliberate and sad irony to the title of The Walking Dead. On the surface, it refers to the shambling undead that have overrun the American South (and for all we know, the rest of the world besides); the survivors call them "walkers". But in the unflinching vision of a zombie apocalypse outlined by writer Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard in their comic-book series - now adapted for TV as well as into this episodic adventure game by Telltale Games - it also applies to the survivors themselves.They're alive but not living, ghosts haunting an empty purgatory, delaying the inevitable. They're doomed more by their mistrust of each other than by the zombie threat. Only the very faintest glimmer of hope illuminates this bleak world - a trait it shares with the best post-apocalyptic fiction, from Cormac McCarthy's The Road back to John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids. This also sets it apart from the thematic tidal wave of zombies which has overwhelmed pop culture in the past decade or so, most of it not much more than a grisly backdrop for standard action and adventure.
Perhaps the best thing you can say about Telltale's The Walking Dead - which spins its own yarn, rather than following the comic as the TV show does - is that it never loses sight of this. Sure, you'll click on zombies' heads to stove them in and hammer buttons in desperate quick-time events. But these sequences are about as relevant as the cut-scenes are to most action games. This is never a game about battling zombies. It's about negotiating human relationships when they're strained to breaking point - and making the impossible, horrifying decisions that a survivor has to.
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