Characters like Joffrey Baratheon, Cersei Lannister, and Ramsay Snow are not simply antagonists who can be countered and manipulated they are powerful, intelligent, capricious villains. Cersei’s famous “you win or you die” line is, to some extent, a call to ruthlessness as a means to “win.” But as the game begins at the end of the third season, cruelty more than ruthlessness seems the path to victory. Second, and more importantly, the characters in the Game of Thrones help the Game of Thrones game immensely by disrupting normal expectations of how video games are supposed to work-and, I’d suggest they’re only able to do this by subverting expectations in the way that Game of Thrones subverts them. What helps Margaery Tyrell in King’s Landing won’t necessarily help with events in the North, and negotiating that is ambiguous in the very best way. First, the multiple characters and multiple settings each provide different possibilities.
#Telltale games game of thrones twitter license#
Beyond the general video game choice of helping one character or another, Telltale’s Game of Thrones benefits from its license and setting tremendously. And, in a really impressive fashion, the choices are often actually difficult. This is a game where the difficulty is almost entirely based on tough choices that you’re forced to make. It’s the last of those that’s most important- those character profiles Telltale released? As with everything else in Westeros, don’t get too attached.Īs with most Telltale episodes, this is a game focused on writing and player decisions than on typical “game.” If you’ve played The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, there are way fewer quick-time events where you might be killed for being too slow, and no real puzzles to speak of. Martin does, with some used for information and some used for audience investment and some used to shatter audience expectations.
#Telltale games game of thrones twitter series#
Perhaps for people who don’t watch the TV series or need a reminder, this is a good way to establish the Bastard of Bolton as a true villain, but apart from that, the scene feels more like a distraction.īut then Telltale uses its multiple important characters like George R.R. In the most obvious of these, a character riding along the Kingsroad runs into Ramsay Snow, and sees him flaying a random character. On the other hand, the multiple player characters can lead to a few cases where the scenes in question feel disconnected. The climax occurs when Ramsay Snow, voiced by Iwan Rheon, arrives to decide House Forrester’s fate. One character in King’s Landing may encourage a diplomatic solution, while one in Ironrath, the homestead of House Forrester, may take a more confrontational path. The bulk of “Iron from Ice” consists of your characters trying to figure out how they can deal with the near-total reversal of fortunes. The Forresters were Stark loyalists, but suddenly find themselves weakened and at the mercy of the new Wardens in the North, House Bolton, and more directly, their local rivals, Bolton bannermen House Whitehall. In this case, this means a division between what the various members of House Forrester should be able to do after the Red Wedding. On one hand, it allowed you to see the world from multiple perspectives and, in a move that I’ve been extremely excited about ever since I saw it in this summer’s Divinity: Original Sin, it allowed you to potentially create situations where characters that the player controls take different sides in different arguments. Initially I was somewhat dubious about this idea. There are three in this episode, two in the North, one in King’s Landing. Instead, much like Game of Thrones itself, it switches between point-of-view characters from scene-to-scene. The initial big suprise I had when playing “Iron from Ice” was that the characters weren’t attached to each episode, as I’d thought when it was announced that there would be five playable characters across six episodes. If you’re interested in more about the game, check out our FAQ here, and a list of release dates for different systems here. Full review after the jump…. It’s not perfect, but its flaws are all what you’d expect from a first episode, and its strengths in place, ready to get even better as the series goes on. The answer to all these questions through most of “Iron from Ice” (the first episode of six) is a clear, if somewhat quiet, “yes.” By the end, the answer is a ringing endorsement that yes, this game is on the right track to be both a fine example of what a Game of Thrones game and a Telltale game should be.