"This is an area that's ripe for exploration. "You can only have so many of the same types of the games fighting for the same consumer dollar every Christmas," he told me. It all comes down to how Telltale sees games, how the company has spent eight years striving (and not always succeeding) to use games to tell stories. I called Telltale's boss Dan Connors to congratulate him on the game and to ask about Lee and why the character means so much to me. In this, I find that I am probably a worse person than Lee. When I am betrayed by Larry, a stone-cold villain, I didn't feel any particular anger towards him, but if I get half a chance, I will definitely cut that #'s throat just because of the thing he did to the old people hiding in the pharmacy. During play, I picked the options that felt natural to me (I lie to other people, including the people I care about, often). In his shoes, I like to think I'd do pretty much the things that Lee does as part of the game's forced narrative. Lee's lack of defining characteristics allows us to experience the apocalypse, and our likely reaction to it, more freely. They are ordinary people, and ordinariness allows us to be comfortable with his simplicity. The story is about the people he encounters and their reaction to danger and societal breakdown. He's surrounded by zombies, but this (for me) is the least interesting aspect of the game and The Walking Dead franchise. Lee's career, the glimpses we see of his upbringing, the feelings he displays about his past and his reactions to apocalypse make us feel for the character without dumping a truck-load of exposition onto our heads. He understands what happens when frightened people gather together. He's a professor of history, a smart guy who has, at least theoretically, knowledge of human behavior in extreme situations. But he's not a bank-robber, or a heartbreakingly damaged product of some grim criminal underclass. He is a criminal (convicted of murder, possibly a crime of passion) which puts him in diametrical opposition to The Walking Dead's main character Rick Grimes, a cop. Everett, a criminal, has no reason to look after Clementine but (so far, at least) he doesn't question his own decision. Many of the other characters have close bonds with other survivors, but they are almost all related to one another. Without Clementine, Lee is just some dude trying to stay alive, but she (a slightly over-cooked innocent) allows him to be sympathetic to us. Lee is not her father, so we can enjoy the special terrors of male-responsibility through his eyes. It helps that his side-kick, the child Clementine, is designed to elicit super-protective instincts in the player. So what makes Everett special? Most of the characters Lee comes across, in my view, are unremarkable, but this helps in allowing the quiet, reasonable, softly spoken man to become part of the story, as opposed to dominating the screen in the tiresome way of most videogame protagonists. But in story terms, he's an empty thing, a human-shape attached to weapons. That's kind of crazy because, compared with most games, Jenson is a deep, sophisticated charmer. It's interesting because the game I played straight after The Walking Dead was Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I found it a complete turn-off because in comparison, Adam Jenson is so two-dimensional and annoying.
I like his personality and I enjoy spending time with him. Rendered in a comic-book style, his facial expressions are emotionally transparent - hopelessness, pain, fatigue, concern, confusion, shame, anger. His one-liners are gently self-deprecating, rather than the usual tired put-downs. He's that rare videogame character who doesn't spend his dialog slots blabbing to you and the rest of the world about his awesomeness. No, the reason this game is so awesome is because Lee Everett is a straight-up nice guy. The puzzles aren't especially challenging you find things and put them to use in a particular order. The gameplay mechanics are rudimentary, involving choosing straightforward dialog options, or clicking on bad guys fast enough to ensure that they go away. The story is a simple and familiar one of confused people running away from extreme danger. On the face of it, The Walking Dead is an ordinary gaming experience.
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