Telltale’s second offering of the holiday season is the product of their fruitful partnership with Warner Bros on The Wolf Among Us earlier this year. This new adventure title, Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series – based on HBO’s wildly successful fantasy series of the same name – offers immense value both to fans of the show and George R. R. Martin’s popular novels.
With only the first episode of the six-episode season currently available, it’s hard to perform a full review just yet, so I’ll offer my impressions of the title so far and the episode as a whole. Set between the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Season 5 of the show, the first episode Iron From Ice focuses on various members of the Forrester family. House Forrester were mentioned recently in the latest novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. They hail from Ironrath, a northern fortress that sits astride an extremely valuable Ironwood forest.
The bulk of this episode plays out in Ironrath, with a few short visits elsewhere – fans will be delighted to see part of the story take place in familiar locations like King’s Landing and involve characters from the series like Tyrion and Cersei Lannister, as well as Margaery Tyrell. All of the characters from the show are voiced by their actors. Peter Dinklage, in particular, turns in his usual swaggering performance as Tyrion proving his rather dry line readings in Destiny were indeed an aberration.
Telltale shake things up from their usual formula for Game of Thrones. In keeping with the series’ narrative habit of jumping from character, Iron from Ice sees you switching characters often. You play as Gared who is the late Lord Gregor Forrester’s squire, Lord Forrester’s daughter Mira, who is Margaery Tyrell’s lady-in-waiting, and Ethan, the young and freshly-minted new lord of House Forrester. Telltale has teased a further two playable characters to be revealed in future episodes.
Compared to Telltale’s last pair of adventures – the comic book inspired The Wolf Among Us and the recently released Tales from the Borderlands, Game of Thrones looks a bit drab. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t look good, it just doesn’t have the vibrant colour palette of it’s stablemates. It’s stylistically very inkeeping with the show’s visual aesthetic. Roads are little more than mud puddles, people get about in leathers and worn cloth, everything seems to be caked in an inch-thick layer of grime. It really helps to sell the bleak tone of the source material and, especially when playing Ethan, you really do feel Westeros’ pervasive sense of hopelessness seeping through.
Where the game does stand out visually are in the textures themselves. Everything has this really lovely painterly look about it that makes it feel as if you’re watching an oil painting come to life. It gives the (correct) impression that this is a delicate world, held together by the most slender of threads and anything that disrupts it will suffer catastrophic repercussions.
The only real criticism I had in terms of visuals was that when the, by now familiar, quicktime events occur in the game, the onscreen prompts are in the same muted green colour as the bulk of the environment. I found initially that it rather easy to miss them because of this. The same forgiving approach to misclicks from previous Telltale adventures remains, though, so getting through is doable while still remaining a challenge.
It’s this unpredictable nature of the story that gels so well with Telltale’s signature style. Every conversation you have is a loaded one. Saying the wrong thing suddenly feels like it carries more weight than it does in other games of theirs. As with other Telltale games, you only have a short time to choose a response in a conversation which can lead to you panicking and picking one at random. You can’t afford that luxury here. Words, and the weight they carry, are like currency in Westeros. Saying the wrong thing will send the wrong message and then you end up with the worst people in the world thinking you’ve wronged them. It’s all incredibly stressful, and the onus is completely on you to get it right.
I won’t go into the details of the plot because spoilers are the greatest thorn in the side of Game of Thrones fans. I will say that the story is as grim as the world around it, blood-soaked and full of surprises that leave you appalled and reeling. It also offers a sliver of story not available to those who have read the novels, nor those who have obsessively watched every episode of the show and the game’s ability to stand alone is a testament to the depth of the Game of Thrones universe and Telltale’s ability as storytellers.
All told, Iron from Ice clocks in at around two hours and it lays a tremendous amount of groundwork for future episodes. It really feels like it’s starting to break into a stride by the time it ends, which is a shame, but it leaves you craving more. At this stage, Telltale have not disclosed when the next episode will arrive so we will have to sit tight until then. I, for one, am very keen to see where they take the series next.
You can grab the first episode right now on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and iOS.
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