Review: The Walking Dead: 400 Days

Game Reviews
Review: The Walking Dead: 400 Days
By Sean Booker
July 6, 2013 - 22:21

Studios: Telltale Games
Rating: M (Mature)
Genre: Adventure Game
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, iOS
Players: 1

400 Days is the sixth episode in Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead series and works to set up the events in the forthcoming second season. You are introduced to an all new cast of characters as you jump around five different stories. The format is different than the first season since you aren’t focusing on one group of survivors but instead being shown a brief glimpse of several events. There isn’t much new features to 400 Days but the short and fast paced episode does a good job of acting like a trailer for what is next to come.

The game starts you off with a bulletin board holding several character photos on it. Each photo you select will drop you into a brief thirty to forty-five minute chunk of game that only loosely relates to the next person’s story. The connection between each group of survivors might be as small as a background element being similar or a location getting used more than once.

This episode really focuses on how each group of people within this 400 day time period impacts the next group (if at all) and how the main character from each is challenged. The characters are interesting for the most part but it’s understandable that we wouldn’t get too much depth from the short experience. Each character is quite different from the next and should allow for an interesting second season if they are continued forward.

If you come into 400 Days expecting the same level of dread as the core episodes then you will be pleased. From the get go you’re tasked with some hard questions that will definitely have players hesitating. And the jumping around plot structure allows for a greater degree of odd and difficult circumstances to occur than we would have seen from one of the more standard episodes.

Each vignette does come across as feeling almost too short. This causes 400 Days to be the shortest episode yet in this series since you can wrap it up in under two hours. The price point does feel a little questionable considering each other episode was also on sale for $5. It would have been nice to get a little more story with each of the character since some cases almost seem rushed. 400 Days really feels like a trailer for an upcoming event rather than something on its own.

The Walking Dead: 400 Days does a good job introducing this new cast of characters but feels a little rushed by the time you’re done. The episode clocks in well under each previous installment so the price point does come into question. But this format of self-contained stories allow for a good level of difference in the scenarios that you will find yourself in. The characters you play as seem promising and high degree of difficult decision making makes a fine return. Fans of the season will appreciate 400 Days as they wait for the second season to arrive later this year.

Rating: 6/10