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dkirschner's Game of Thrones (2014) (PC)

[January 23, 2016 10:50:03 AM]

Another extremely intense narrative game from Telltale. They've got this genre down to a formula with their own style. My girlfriend and I played this together over the past month, all six episodes. Not only are there more episodes, but they are longer than those in The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. Both contributing to the length and as a result of the length, the pace is slower. Not unexciting at all, just a slower pace. And it’s Game of Thrones, so it’s political. You’ve got to understand everyone’s motivations and how they all fit together, which in some ways makes the narrative decisions more agonizing than The Walking Dead. Like, any interaction with Cersei made us tremble. You do not want to piss off Cersei Lannister.

One of the most impressive feats of the game is how the story weaves into the other Game of Thrones media. This one starts off with a bang during the Red Wedding and you experience a couple other major events like Joffrey and Margaery’s wedding and Daenerys’s siege of Meereen. You play the game as various members of the Forrester family of Ironrath, who were bannermen to house Stark. Obviously, the Starks aren’t in power anymore which has left the Forresters in a vulnerable position, prey to the new warden of the North, Roose Bolton. Well, Bolton doesn’t ever interact with you, but you get the pleasure of dealing with the insane Lord Ramsay, another character with whom all interactions result in sweaty palms. The Forresters have access to a big ironwood forest, which is a key resource in the game (I honestly can’t remember if ironwood is mentioned in the books or show). House Lannister needs ironwood (it’s very high quality, strong wood) for military, construction, etc.

So there are a lot of Forresters such that you get a great diversity of environments and characters to deal with. Some are in Ironrath, ok, a brother Asher was exiled across the Great Sea and is charged with raising an army to return to defend Ironrath, a sister Mira is Margaery’s handmaiden in King’s Landing (we liked her story a lot because King’s Landing is not safe!), there’s a Forrester bastard who gets sent to the Wall (convenient for putting Jon Snow in the game), and so on. There are other small houses with whom house Forrester has tenuous friendships or hostilities toward, and all their politics and wars and betrayals are present.

Another great thing: any character from the show is voiced by the actor who plays them. Cersei, Tyrion, Ramsay Snow, Jon Snow, Margaery, and more. They’re so good, and the rest of the cast is excellent too. The production values on this are definitely higher than other Telltale games. They obviously got some money to make this. Overall, although I loved it, I wouldn’t rate it as highly as The Walking Dead series, but I think it will be more memorable than The Wolf Among Us for its part of a cross-media franchise that I love. It’s definitely worth playing if you’re a Game of Thrones fan. It won’t make you see major events in any new ways, but it’ll show you how those events affected another house and other characters, and just many of the other stories that were also occurring at the same time. If you don’t know much about Game of Thrones, I wouldn’t play this because there really is a lot of implicit knowledge about the world and its established characters and events you will lack. Having that knowledge greatly enhanced my appreciation of the game and understanding of the larger context.