Interactive Stories

Should be classified as games.

It's been a while since I finished Telltale's The Walking Dead, set in the same universe as the popular zombie show and it's many spin-offs which follows suit in that it's more about the people instead of the zombies. While the art is always good and improves throughout each game in the series most of the player input relies on timed dialogue responses and QTE button mashing. Also while your choices can change the story a little bit, don't expect to be able to deviate from the main plot points as it doesn't go crazily branching out like in the Witcher 2. My main gripe was that there were so many loose ends at the end of the story.

The Walking Dead season 2 fixes that with much fewer loose ends by the time you see the credits but is a bit odd in that most life or death decisions of the group fall upon a little kid. Walking Dead: A New Frontier again fixes that and for me, has the strongest story of all of them while Walking Dead: The Final Season adds a low key combat system but feels shorter and not as refined as the previous installment. Still good, but the ending especially felt a bit forced. I'd still recommend all of them, especially if you are a Walking Dead fan anyway.

Memorable characters are a plus.

Also in the Interactive Story category is Bloodshore which focuses on a Battle Royale type game taking place on an island. Instead of art, this title makes use of live action decent enough to be a B grade movie. Like the above games you can't escape the main plot points but your choices do affect the story and the ending. I also quite liked the tracker which shows your stats that change based on your decisions and actually affect if your chosen actions succeed or not. Pretty cool and one I'd recommend if you don't have any Telltale games to play anymore.