The scriptwriter is himself

The premiere of the last season of “Walking” was watched by 17.3 million spectators - this is a historical record for the series of basic cable channels in the United States. The show conquers a new audience every year, the sixth release has already been announced, and AMC plans to remove the spin-off with other heroes. The site Rottentomatoes , which believes the harmony of algebra and repays the reviews of critics in numbers, gives the series a rating of 97% - more than the “Game of Thrones”, “Card House”, “Underground Empire” and many other popular television dramas.

The zombie apocalypse turned out to be the perfect scene for any plot. Here is a fight for power, and melodramas with betrayal and pregnancies, and a novel of education, and love during cholera, and chronicles of discretion, and the lives of saints. The “walking dead” are so professionally made and so successful that it is strange to make some complaints to them. But after four years, it still seems that the series stumbled somewhere, infected and began to turn into a zombie himself-and now barely dragges his legs and looks like a dead man.

The zombie series does not remember his past-and reproduces the same plots for the fifth time.

The first series of the fifth season began with a description of the human massacre, the second Cannibal Hell was going on in the second, the greatest of the hopes that the heroes have been nourished in the fifth - to stop the epidemic on the country's scale. On November 30, the eighth series was released, after which the show took a break until February. Further two groups of generally good people, apparently, will begin the bloody and meaningless internecine war - because no one knows how to negotiate when the end of the world is around. The zombie series does not remember his past-and reproduces the same plots for the fifth time. As a result, the main question of the “walking dead” - “What would you do in the place of the heroes?” - Often there is nothing to answer.

With a completely different intonation, it is asked by The Walking Dead: The Game (hereinafter - TWDTG ). A video game in the Universe of the Walking, which began with the comic book Robert Kirkman, is arranged according to the principle of an interactive series. New episodes have been released once every few months since 2012. Two seasons have already been released and one spin -off. The passage of each episode takes one and a half to two hours and does not require special gaming skills from the user. Instead of running, shooting and smoking, the player here first of all chooses the development options and replicas in dialogs - and eventually writes his own story.

The zombie here has to be killed not so often, and it is required to only press the right buttons in time for this. Flucus with objects is found, but this is not puzzles, but part of the post -apocalyptic surroundings - the world in which you need to fight for food, gasoline and cartridges all the time. The main content of the game is a series of moral dilemmas. From the viewer of the performance, we turn into a co -author, from a witness of a crime - into an accomplice. We decide when to lie, and when to tell the truth; whom to spare and whom to punish; whom to save and whom to quit. It is impossible to remain kind and fair, it is impossible to always choose the smaller of evils. The New York Times about TWDTG noticed that this is one of the few games in which each murder is accompanied by a feeling of guilt. And every life, we add, is filled with suffering. In the game, a whole ensemble of difficult destinies was collected, and at first the frank “seriality” of characters is annoying. This girl will have to shoot her beloved dog. This man was changed by his wife. There that guy is the shadow of his brother. But the fewer heroes remains to the final, the more they look like prisoners of death from the Seventh Press - no one superfluous, and each with their own load.

Sometimes the heroes from the series (Korean Glenn, the old man cherished), but the game holds on the sidelines, preferring to equal to the Kirkman comic. From him here is a gray graphics that replace the acting game with hypertrophied emotions on drawn faces and airless personnel. It looks great, although the interactive series, of course, is inferior in expressiveness and ingenuity to the television. In every season of the “walking dead” on AMC there is an hour or two of conversations of related captives and executioners in some shed, it was written and removed all as if Tarantino produces new “frantic dogs” once a year. And the endless labels of buildings with a crossbow at the ready are reminiscent of the “vampires” of John Carpenter - a classic horror with a double bottom. There are no such tricks on TWDTG , and all the operator techniques are reduced to the collisions on the faces of the heroes or a reporting shake. But action -packed and short, like a flash, game episodes simply do not allow to notice these shortcomings. In addition, developers from Telltale Games are real erudites. Heroes here quote Hemingway and London, one of the storylines resembles “10 blacks” (surrounded by a thousand walking dead), and surprises are scattered everywhere for lovers of zombies about zombies.

So far, only two seasons and 11 episodes are available, and most importantly in anticipation of the third part (it will be released in early 2015) - do not start passing the previous ones. And then the main deception of TWDTG will be revealed: almost nothing depends on the player’s actions here except his own sensations. The plot is nonlinear, but in moderation. If you need something to happen, the game will force you to vote for your script. We really influence the little things. For example, we decide which table to sit at a Christmas party: behind one - our friends from the past, after another - a new group. Very soon, these people will fight each other to death. And although these are just painted pictures, and a matter of seconds are given a choice, an interactive series knows how to make you put the whole soul into it.

In parallel with the "walking dead" in Telltale , they immediately deal with three important franchises. Wolf Among US is a film adaptation of the amazing comic book Fables , Noar about what would happen, live the characters of world folklore in modern New York. Of course, everything would be terrible: the gray wolf turned into an embittered cop, the blue beard - into a corrupt oligarch, Prince Charmoning - in a gigol, a mermaid - in a stripper. And Zlatovlaska is sitting under house arrest, so as not to adopt anyone with his hair. Since the ghetto all the time hangs the threat of war with a certain Miriads of the world emperor, the heroes are looking for a compromise for their emigrant community between the democracy of the New World and the semi -native dictatorship. The author Bill Willengem says that his Fabyltown is the metaphor of the state of Israel.

The recently released pilot of another interactive series “Tales from the Borderlands: Episode 1 - Zer0 SUM” is a cosmic western in the traditions of the cult show “Firefly”. As in the recent drama "Lovers" , its plot was built at the cross interrogation of two heroes-in this case, the robber-robber and corporate samurai. Only now we are not talking about a dull adultery, but about a dashing scam on a distant planet, where valuable artifacts were suddenly discovered. Sunny of the game: in the world there is always a wild West. It seems to be the most funny and smart of the science fiction games of this year.

And until the end of December, Telltale Games promises to release “Game of Thrones - Episode 1: Iron from Ice” - a pilot of an interactive gaming series for the “Game of Thrones” universe. But this is a topic for a separate conversation.