The Walking Dead: Episode 5 - No Time Left

* Read this review as it originally appeared in the November issue of Adventure Lantern.

No Time Left marks the fifth and final installment of the first season to Telltale's The Walking Dead series. Throughout the entire series, the goal for Lee Everett and company has been to protect Clementine and their loved ones from the horrors of the zombie apocalypse, and to reach the coast in hopes of finding a seaworthy boat to escape the droning hordes of undead. With Clementine kidnapped by an unknown voice on the walkie-talkie and Lee bitten by a walker at the end of the previous episode, No Time Left commands an unprecedented sense of urgency going into the finale. Everything is at stake, no one is safe, and time is of the essence.

As another episode in the series, No Time Left is a fine experience, but as a series finale it leaves a little something to be desired. The final moments are easily some of the most emotional I've ever seen in a video game, but most of the other major things the series had been building towards were kind of anticlimactic, and the post-credits cutscene basically only serves as a teaser for season two without offering any conclusive resolution to this particular story arc. If you've been keeping up with the series, you pretty much have to play Episode Five, but I find it difficult not to feel conflicted over Telltale's handling of the final episode.

Compared to other episodes in the series, Episode Five has perhaps the simplest story progression, since your only objective is a relatively straightforward matter of catching up to Clementine at the Marsh House, the hotel where her parents were staying in Savannah. As such, the bulk of the episode consists of wandering through streets and rooftops as you sort of wait for the next accident or catastrophe to happen. There's one sequence where you hole up in the house from Episode Four, attempting to defend it from walkers (almost reminiscent of the cabin sequence from Resident Evil 4, except in a more adventure-gameplay format) before being forced to take refuge in the attic.

Perhaps the biggest decision you have to make comes in the first few minutes of the game; after passing out from the effects of the bite on the wrist, you're faced with the decision of amputating your arm. Those who have read the comics or watched the television show will know that removing the source of the bite quickly enough can stop the spread of the infection, meaning Lee might have a chance to survive (if he doesn't die of blood loss), but he'll be manually impaired in the coming efforts of rescuing Clementine. Leaving the arm intact means dealing with occasional blackouts as the effects of zombification grow stronger.

Like virtually all other decisions in the series, this one doesn't have a major impact on anything since you still wind up in the same situations with the same solutions, but there are a few nice differences in certain scenes and you are, in fact, treated to a few completely different (albeit small) scenes depending on this choice. Despite that, it's still kind of amusing that, even if you leave his arm intact, Lee still only uses one hand for a number of actions, and tends to walk around with his left arm hanging lifelessly by his side, or simply doesn't use it to gesture during certain conversations, slightly belittling the impact of the decision.

The best thing about Episode Five is that it brings many of your decisions full circle, forcing you to reflect on many of the choices you'd made and demonstrating that there was a lasting impact on what may have seemed like a trivial decision early in the series. Even though, in the grand scheme of things, your decisions didn't have an effect on the direction of the story, this episode emphasizes that each decision was supposed to be a personal judgment of morality, an intrinsic conflict you had to resolve for yourself, living with the consequences in regret or contentment.

But even still, with this being the final episode, you'd think the necessity for streamlining decisions would no longer apply, that the game could actually branch out towards the end without having to tie everything together at the end of the episode. At the end of Episode Four, it seemed like things were actually branching out in terms of who was going to go with you on your mission to rescue Clementine, but things revert back to the usual status quo 10 or 15 minutes into Episode Five.

Likewise, since Telltale announced they'd be making a follow-up second season to this series, everything has to converge to one canonical ending so that they have a canonical start to season two; there is one, single ending that everyone gets, no matter what seemingly critical, branching decisions you make towards the end in regards to Clementine's future, and that's a bitter pill to swallow for a game that supposedly adapts to the choices you make, especially after investing so much time playing the game and waiting weeks or months between episodes.

Either way, the whole point of Episode Five is to see the ending and everything the series has been building towards, and in many regards it's somewhat anticlimactic. Disappointment and anticlimaxes are to be expected in a zombie apocalypse, but the fact remains that this is a video game and building effective drama should be an important consideration in the story writing -- you can still have a tragically disappointing resolution without sacrificing the dramatic impact. The final moments before the credits are very effective in both regards, sincerely tugging at my heartstrings and causing me to shed a tear, but the other inevitable resolutions we'd been expecting (learning the fate of Clementine's parents and meeting with the stranger on the walkie-talkie) were, to varying degrees, a letdown.

The real disappointment comes after the credits when you're treated to a brief cutscene meant to add some closure after the abrupt cut to credits. The problem with this cutscene, however, is that it doesn't provide any closure -- it's a deliberate cliffhanger that feels more like a teaser for season two than an actual resolution for season one. Cliffhangers between seasons are common enough that I can't really complain about that, but season finales are supposed to resolve one story arc while setting up another, and the cliffhanger ending to this first season leaves so many things unresolved as to be almost completely unsatisfying.

Episode Five also feels noticeably shorter than other recent episodes. Before going into Episode Five, I decided to replay Episode Four to refresh my memory and (hopefully) see some different outcomes; that took me 3.1 hours to accomplish, knowing exactly what to do at every step of the way. Episode Five took 2.1 hours to complete. I was utterly shocked at one point when an entire chapter (1/8th of the game's narrative) lasted literally no more than two minutes.

Still, I have to tip my hat to Telltale for not copping out on the ending by trying to tie things together with a consequence-free, happy ribbon. From the very beginning, I kind of knew it had to end one of two ways, and I was very pleased that they chose to the take the darker route, because that's the essence of the comics. I feel like Telltale definitely could've handled this finale much better (it feels a little rushed in some regards), but the final moments were truly touching, even despite a handful of anticlimactic disappointments and missed opportunities.

Reviewing Moment Games' Life in the Dorms

* Read this review as it originally appeared in the November issue of Adventure Lantern.

Ramen noodles, plastic lightsabers, frisbees, lumberjacks, black bears, psychotic resident assistants, and splenectomies -- these are all things you may or not encounter in college life, but they're certainly a major part of Life in the Dorms, a $1 adventure game currently available on Xbox Live Indie Games. You play as Dack Peeples, a college freshman experiencing his first few days in his new dormitory. Dack's time in college starts out reasonably enough as he adjusts to a new environment, but the situation quickly escalates as his RA comes up with increasingly devious and maniacal ways to get his new pupils to bond.

Life in the Dorms plays like any typical adventure game: you talk to characters, collect items, and solve puzzles to advance the story. Most of the puzzles are pretty creative, but what really makes the game enjoyable is the setting and its unique sense of humor. Not many games specifically focus on college life, and I frequently found myself laughing or smiling at the absurd situations happening around Dack. And for a $1 game, there's quite a bit of content to experience; it took me roughly 5.5 hours to finish the game, so you can definitely get your money's worth.

The premise is simple: Dack arrives at his new college dormitory as a freshman, missing his old high school friends and wishing he could just go back to high school. He says goodbye to his parents and starts unpacking his things, but his RA Brian shows up to inform him of the scavenger hunt -- a competition among floormates with roommates paired up in teams. Since Dack's roommate hasn't arrived yet, he has to do the scavenger hunt on his own, hoping to win the $300 prize and buy a new myPhone. As he works on the scavenger hunt, he begins to worry about what his new roommate will be like. Introductions with floormates follows, and soon his pet turtle goes missing, a ransom note left in its tank.

If any of this sounds mundane, it's anything but. At every other turn in this game, something outrageously absurd is happening. That's where the game's sense of humor comes into play, often stemming from obscure references and self-parody, but it's mainly a surreal element built upon hyperbole, absurdity, and logical defiance. Early in the game, Dack jumps to conclusions about his new roommate, fearing that he might be an axe-wielding, murderous psychopath (one of the movies he brings with him is titled "How to Tell if Your Roommate is an Axe-Wielding Psycopath").

It's amusing because Dack's paranoid thoughts about his roommate are so absurdly irrational, and yet every piece of evidence that he learns about his roommate (up until he actually meets him) seems to corroborate those irrational beliefs, at least in his eyes. It makes you think that Dack is just being paranoid, and so you smirk at how far he extends the irrationality, because it feels like that's supposed to be the joke in and of itself. When his roommate finally arrives, he's got an axe in his hands, and all of Dack's paranoid delusions are confirmed, as implausible as that might seem.

As it turns out, his roommate comes from a long line of lumberjacks and is going to college for its prestigious lumberjack program. It's all about subverting your expectations, and this particular joke manages to throw several amusing curve balls. That's kind of how the humor works; it takes a simple situation, pushes it to the extreme, and then puts a completely twist-ending on the punchline. Some of the jokes are a little hit or miss, but the attempts are always creative, and that's enough to appreciate the clever writing.

As an adventure game, the bulk of the gameplay consists of solving puzzles, and this part of the game proves fairly satisfying. Most of the puzzles feel naturally-implemented in the environment and story; you're obviously trying to solve a puzzle, but they make sense within the context and they give you clear goals to work towards. There's a nice variety to the types of puzzles, as well -- some involve combining items in your inventory, some involve saying the right things in a conversation, some involve performing a surgery while blind-folded, etc. It's also somewhat impressive how many puzzles the designers were able to fit into relatively few environments -- even though you spend most of the game in the same handful of scenes, there's plenty to do.

Where the puzzles fall short, however, is that many of them require a very specific order of operations to solve. One of your objectives in the scavenger hunt, for example, is to find a roll of toilet paper. You go to the restroom and find a bunch of rolls up on a high shelf, so you'd think you would have a few options at your disposal (using your plastic lightsaber to knock one over), but you can't actually reach this solution until you've checked each bathroom stall first. It's just kind of annoying that you know the solution, and yet you have to play along with meaningless, arbitrary steps to get there.

Some puzzles have really obtuse solutions, as well. In the same scavenger hunt, you have to move a refrigerator five feet. I'm not a very strong individual, but I've shimmied a full-sized refrigerator a couple of feet before without much physical exertion. But because this is supposed to be a puzzle with some kind of clever solution, Dack says he's too weak to move the fridge on his own. The solution to this puzzle is to slip plastic frisbees under two legs of the fridge so you can slide it across the floor .... but if Dack is strong enough to lift the fridge high enough to slip the frisbees under it, and strong enough to pull the fridge while balancing it on two legs, then why couldn't he have just moved the thing himself?

In the same puzzle with the refrigerator, when you try to unplug the refrigerator, Dack says he shouldn't do that unless he has a good reason to. The whole time he's saying this, I'm thinking "you HAVE a good reason to unplug it." He doesn't unplug the fridge until after you've already placed the improvised furniture coasters under it, another instance of a puzzle requiring a very precise order of operations to progress. Does it really matter whether you unplug the fridge before or after you place the coasters? This seeming lack of cooperation from your protagonist becomes extremely frustrating when you don't have the game's intended solution in mind.

Once again returning to the scavenger hunt, another item on the list requires you to construct a scale model of the dormitory, and you ultimately have to build it out of ramen noodles. Is there anyone who would honestly ever consider using ramen noodles to build a model a rational thought? It took me so long to come to this conclusion because I had an ample supply of crafting materials available to me (I got glue from some of my floormates, and I had a bunch of cardboard boxes I could've used in my room), and it got to a point where I was arbitrarily trying every single thing I could because the solution was just so obtuse.

Fortunately, the frustrations of the scavenger hunt are the worst offenders, and they're out of the way very quickly, happening very early in the game. Once you're through with the scavenger hunt, the puzzles become a little more manageable and sensible, but those kinds of problems still manifest themselves throughout the game, remaining a consistent (albeit slight) annoyance in the puzzle design.

Other than that, there are a number of little things that add up to detract from the overall experience. Whenever you click to examine something, you have to wait three whole seconds while your character slowly turns in place to face the camera, and then waits for the camera to zoom in on his face. He does the same thing whenever you decide to "flit" about something on your phone. This makes very simple actions far more time-consuming and laborious than they really should be.

Every time you want to talk to your floormates, you click the "use" icon on their door, and Dack says to himself "Maybe I should knock first." That's kind of implied by the action icon; you don't need to say it every single time. Some of the animations are a little wonky, like sitting down or typing on a phone, and I feel like conversations would've been more interesting if characters could have had very simple animations for their eyebrows, like angry and sad eyebrows to exaggerate the emotions of the dialogue. I also ran into an inventory glitch at one point (when Dack gets trapped inside a video game) that completely prevented me from doing anything, requiring me to load the most recent save.

Life in the Dorms is certainly not a perfect game, but except for a couple major annoyances with some of the puzzle designs, it's a fine game with a lot to enjoy. The humor and setting are particularly enjoyable, and its low cost means it's definitely worth your time and money. I would even love to see a sequel in the same style, where Dack gets to experience other aspects of college life for the first time, like dining halls, classes, student groups, sporting events, or whatever else. Here's hoping we can see more out of Moment Games in the future.

Killing Floor Twisted Christmas 2012

Christmas is just around corner, which means there's another "Twisted Christmas" event for Killing Floor. The folks at Tripwire Interactive have been holding these Twisted Christmas events annually ever since 2010, and it's always fun to get free content updates for one of your favorite multiplayer games. This year's event features a return of the usual Christmas-themed specimen skins, the chance to get all of the old Twisted Christmas achievements and character skins, a new map, three new weapons, and two paid DLC skin packs. 

The gimmick this year is that, after besting Evil Santa in his own lair, and then a year later in his ice cave, Evil Santa has set up a new base of operations on the moon. You follow him all the way to his moon base to fight Christmas specimen in low-gravity. The update itself is pretty good, but honestly, it's beginning to feel like Killing Floor has jumped the shark. I've been feeling less and less excitement about Killing Floor events lately as each one continues to add controversial, game-changing content and marketing policies. My full run-down awaits after the jump.

The New Map

The new map is called "Moon Base" and actually isn't very Christmas-y, save for a couple of Christmas trees scattered around the map and a handful of snowmen desk figurines. So, in terms of being a Twisted Christmas map, it's kind of lame, but that doesn't really matter much since the map itself is pretty cool. It's an original idea (at least, for a TWI stock map) that looks fantastic and has a fun design. I don't know how I feel about the low-gravity effects of the map, since in some regards it makes the game easier (crawlers jump kind of lethargically now and are less of a threat) but also makes the game harder (crawlers float all over the place and trip you up a bit easier), but the low gravity is really fun with shotguns, since the recoil can send you flying all the way across the room.

The New Weapons

The Schneidzekk Medic Gun

The Schneidzekk Medic Gun is basically just like every other medic gun in the game already. It boasts a higher rate-of-fire and supposedly a higher damage-per-shot, but actually seems to do less damage than the M7A3. It only weighs 3kg, has a fast dart recharge rate (like the MP5), but costs a hefty £1300 at rank 6. Overall, kind of meh.

The Dwarfs!? Axe

The Dwarfs!? Axe is a new melee weapon for the berserker, acquired either by accumulating 40k total gold in the free-to-play version of Tripwire's Dwarfs!? game (getting the "Not a Warhammer" achievement), or by buying Dwarfs!? for $9.99. Getting this weapon is really gimmicky and the cross-over kind of annoys me, but I'm not terribly impressed with the weapon either. Its biggest advantage is that primary-fire attacks knock enemies back, but I just don't find it that fun to use, not to mention its slow attack speed.

The Zed Eradication Device, aka the ZED

To get this gun, you have to find all 16 pieces of it scattered across the Moon Base map. Once you get the achievement, you have permanent access to buy the ZED in any match on any map for £2000. It fires plasma shots, has a radar device that shows specimen positions, and it has an alt-fire that slows specimens and debuffs their damage resistance.

When the ZED was first announced on the Twisted Christmas 2012 page, people were quick to worry about it being over-powered, but it's actually not too bad. The primary fire does pathetic damage in a 6-man HOE match, hardly sufficient to be used as a weapon. The alt-fire is a nice option for medics and possibly for commandos or support specialists, and the radar is really only useful for calling out priority targets like scrakes, fleshpounds, or sirens before you get a visual on them.

The New DLC Packs

After releasing the very controversial community weapons pack as paid-for DLC, which introduced four completely new weapons to the game, two of which were completely unique weapon types that had no free counterparts, TWI received a lot of criticism from dedicated fans, because it went against TWI's original promises to only release cosmetic DLCs. This time, TWI have released the entirely cosmetic Golden Weapons Pack, which is just a $7.99 reskin of the AK47, M79, Combat Shotgun, and the Katana.

While I appreciate that they're not charging for gameplay-altering content, the weapon skins are still kind of annoying to me. Golden weapons are kind of cliche at this point, what with numerous recent games featuring golden weapons, but it's especially annoying that, if you don't own the DLC pack, the weapons are still listed in the trader menu every time you go to buy guns. You have to scroll past useless, greyed-out "DLC" tabs every time. So if you don't own the Community Weapons DLC pack, either, then you've got eight useless slots wasting valuable space in the trader window, and you can bet your ass TWI will be releasing more of these in the future, meaning the trade window is going to become even more cluttered.

At this point, TWI really need to do something with the trader window. Currently, every single weapon is displayed in a single, long list loosely organized by perk. But KF is a game where you sometimes don't have enough time to buy everything you need, and sometimes miss out on a valuable purchase by mere seconds -- with the dozens of weapons that have been added since the game's release and all these new DLC weapon packs, it's just a bit of a hassle to navigate the trader window and could use some better organization. It would be nice if the DLC weapons weren't in the trader window if you didn't own them.

The Zed Eradication Device (ZED): alt-fire in action

The other DLC pack is yet another "premium" character pack, a $4.99 pack containing only a single character skin, that of the robot D.A.R. I used to buy all of the character packs, because they used to be $1.99 for four different characters, but ever since TWI switched to charging $4.99 for a single character I kind of lost interest. I already have enough different character skins, and all of these premium DLC packs are starting to feel like a shameless cash grab to me.

Other gameplay changes

The only other significant change I've noticed is the rather silly tweaks TWI have made to the berserker perk. One the one hand, they've tried to nerf the zerker by massively inflating the cost of his weapons (the axe used to cost £150 at base value, now it costs £1000), but on the other hand they've added the area-of-effect arc (which used to be unique to the scythe and claymore) to every melee weapon (including the piddly little machete) which makes all of the zerker weapons essentially the same with very minor statistical differences and greatly different costs.

A room in the new Moon Base map.

I don't even understand their motivation with raising the cost of the machete. At one point they nerfed the knife to make the machete a more appealing option for players, but people still never used it. Now that it costs five times as much, people are gonna be even less likely to use it. Either way, while it makes sense to raise the cost of weapons for the berserker since they don't have to buy ammunition and usually have a large excess of cash anyway, it's kind of bullshit how expensive the weapons are to buy off-perk.

For instance, when I play support specialist I always like to carry an axe for stunning scrakes and conserving ammo against incidental trash. It was great because it cost £150 and could easily be replaced if I died and lost it. Now it costs me £1000, almost as much as it costs me to buy an AA12, but since I never buy an AA12, buying an axe is literally the most expensive weapon for my loadout. I also like to use the katana when playing medic or commando, but that now costs an outrageous £2000. If you ask me, they should have left the prices the same (or at least, made them no more than 50% more expensive) so that players could still buy the weapons off-perk at somewhat reasonable prices, and just reduce the discount berserkers get so they still have to pay more than they were originally.

Killing Floor Twisted Christmas Specimen (Zed) Skins

This is just further evidence of how ineptly TWI have been handling the balance in Killing Floor. When everyone was complaining that the M99 was ridiculously OP, they raised the cost of ammunition to an outrageous level to the point that they basically rendered the entire weapon useless and obsolete, rather than balancing it properly. When everyone was complaining that the Buzzsaw Bow was ridiculously OP, they raised the cost of ammunition. Now they're just raising the price of all zerker weapons instead of making proper nuanced tweaks to the perk's performance.

In Conclusion

With all of these changes TWI have made to Killing Floor in the past six months, it's ceasing to be the game I know and love and becoming something else entirely. It's losing its tight cohesiveness in favor of excessive feature creep, simply adding more and more shit to the game without thinking it through properly and asking if it really belongs. I mean, there used to be a certain degree of realism to the weapons, with all the weapons being based on real-life counterparts -- and now we have a medieval fantasy dwarven axe and a plasma-casting space gun.

Besides that, TWI are demonstrating that they're getting incredibly lazy with their technique for balancing the game, not doing the game the proper service it deserves. Their business model for KF is progressively turning it into a nickel-and-dime free-to-play style game despite that it already costs $20 to buy. Among all of their products, KF has consistently been their most popular and biggest source of income, so it seems like while they're working on other major projects (such as the massive expansion for Red Orchestra 2, Rising Storm) they're just using KF as a cash cow instead of properly focusing on it.

Granted, you don't have to buy any of the recent absurd DLC to enjoy the game, but it's kind of annoying that they shove the DLC in your face constantly in-game, from the main menu advertisements to the greyed-out trader window listings. Even the free content updates have changed the game significantly, making it far less exciting to play and leaving me worried every time they announce a new update. And I haven't even mentioned the fact that they completely removed the whitelist, a decision that has simply done more damage than anything else. Whereas other events brought me back for dozens of extra hours, this year's Twisted Christmas event called me back for just 2.5 hours before I got bored or annoyed by everything.

Impressions of Forge

Forge is a fantasy multiplayer action game (with light RPG elements) that recently launched on Steam. After failing to reach its fundraising goal on Kickstarter, Dark Vale took the project to the Steam Greenlight, where it succeeded and made its way to an official release. Described as an MMO FPS that blends the tactical combat of end-game PVP from MMORPGs with the typical action of an FPS, I was immediately intrigued once I saw the game in Steam's "new releases" tab. 

After playing about eight hours, I'm rather enjoying Forge. There are some shaky things going on with its launch, there's obviously a lot of content missing, and there are certain aspects of its current design that kind of bug me, but the overall experience has been satisfying despite these kinds of initial issues. The controls are tight and responsive, the combat is tactical and visceral, the classes are nice and varied, and the maps are really interesting. Dark Vale are still working on the game, and with the things they've promised, I have high expectations for the game to continue improving. More of my thoughts after the jump.

Forge is a third-person, class-based team arena game in sort of the same vein as Team Fortress 2, except in a fantasy setting with swords and sorcery instead of guns. The five classes you can choose between are the Assassin, the Pathfinder, the Pyromancer, the Shaman, and the Warden. Assassins and wardens are melee fighters, with assassins relying on stealth and deception to take out their foes, while wardens concentrate on defense and buffing their teammates. The pathfinder is the archer complete with poison arrows and traps, the pyromancer is the fire mage with fire storms and walls of flame, and the shaman is the self-explanatory healer.