I pretty much stopped playing adventures somewhere in the 90's, after there had been some great games like The Secret of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango and the genre fell out of fashion. I know that with The Walking Dead from Telltale adventures are somewhat back in favor again. But I am not a fan of horror stories, and especially dislike the zombiecalypse scenario. I can never suspend my disbelief over something so silly. So I never tried The Walking Dead, and not even The Wolf Among Us. But this week Telltale released another episodic adventure on The Game of Thrones, which is much more up my alley. So I bought the game, which means paying for all episodes and only getting the first one yet. Short version of this blog post: I regretted that purchase.

Adventure games used to be about clever puzzles, and I guess some of the new ones still are. But apparently not the Telltale adventures. The gameplay consists nearly exclusively of dialogue choices and Quicktime events. Not expecting those I had problems at first in the prologue / tutorial: The tutorial taught me only mouse commands, so when suddenly an up arrow appeared on my screen I assumed I had to do some up movement with the mouse. Turns out I had to press the "W" key. But as the game hadn't used WASD movement before that point, that wasn't obvious, and would have been exactly the sort of stuff that I would expect a tutorial to be more explicit about. Once you know which button is which, the rest of the game becomes trivially easy. Press the right button when shown on the screen and win.

The dialogue choices weren't much more interesting. I experimented a bit with playing through scenes several times, but the scene always ends the same way, regardless of my dialogue choices. Stupidly the dialogue choices have a timer, and even more stupidly you can stop that timer by pressing space as pause key. So why put a timer in in the first place? So that you can leave the keyboard and the let the game play through the dialogues by itself? The game pretends that you dialogue choices have consequences, giving you messages like "Lord Forester will remember that". In fact Lord Forester will remember until the end of his life, which happens about one minute later. It is hard to believe that a dead man's memories will have a huge impact on the story later.

So overall Telltale's Game of Thrones is almost exclusively there to tell a story. The story isn't half bad. But the gameplay certainly is. It is some sort of pseudo-interactive story, where the player doesn't really have any agency, but the game tries to keep up the pretense that he has. I would have had more fun if the same story had been told in an additional episode of the HBO series. I think for a real adventure game I need to play something from Daedalic.