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So anyone who was around gaming last year has some knowledge of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead release, either because they played it or heard about it from those raving lunatics who played it. I was one of the raving lunatics.

2012’s The Walking Dead release was not innovative when it came to gameplay. It was a simple point and click game with some rather muddy shooting moments thrown in halfway through. But thankfully, Telltale Game did not focus on gameplay for this episodic title. What they did was use the standard of point and click gameplay as the skeleton for something far, far greater. They made a truly interactive narrative.

I’m not going to expound much more on that, as reviews can be found throughout gaming space on the web. What I am going to talk about is how they’ve used that storytelling structure in the one-shot, 400 Days.

If the original season of TWD was a novel set into video game form, then 400 Days is a series of interconnected vignettes.

400 Days introduces 5 characters who are not tied with the previous game. As before, each character has a pretty troubled past to inform the current story. While each vignette was interesting in its own way, some were not as emotionally gripping. Namely, Wyatt, who we know little of through his story, other than being a drug-user and pretty high-strung (was that a pun?). Anyway, the others each had much tighter grips on my emotions, as we experienced a young man get picked up on the side of the road, only to be faced with the harsh, violent reality of this new world. Or Shel, the protective older sister who is trying to keep her little piece of safety for her and her younger sibling.

We didn’t have the time committed to these characters to have the decisions weigh as heavy as they did whenever we made a choice with Lee in the first season, but the conflicts were interesting and certainly kept with the company’s ethos of unsettling choices.

I’m interested to know how this episode will fit in with the upcoming second season, which HAS to continue the story from where it was left off. I’m assuming that the characters here will be part of another group that will be encountered in the new season; perhaps one of them will be the new lead in the season.

It’s upsetting to me though, that this episode is hard to judge on it’s own. All opinions, my own and those of others who have played the first season, are tainted by the expectation of the second season. As much as I can separate the two, I have enjoyed the hour or so that I spent in 400 Days. But this only whetted my desire for TWD season 2, which should be coming later this year.

If it doesn’t, at least Telltale Games is releasing another game: The Wolf Among Us, based from Vertigo Comics acclaimed Fables series.