I love The Walking Dead. A lot of people, it seems, love The Walking Dead, as an entity. It’s a slow-moving freight train of a thing, barreling into and over everything it encounters. It is a hulking horror Harry Potter. A zombie Star Wars. The comic book spawned a TV series, which spawned a spinoff and several video games.

The most recent game is a tie-in called The Escapists: The Walking Dead, which combines the droll horror of The Walking Dead with the claustrophobia of the indie hit The Escapists.

On paper, it sounds like a wonderful collaborative idea. The Walking Dead is a zombie story with a long tail, very often about the act of surviving long-term and rebuilding society after a zombie apocalypse, and The Escapists involves surviving within the walls of a prison. Sounds like a match made in a hellish, post-apocalyptic wasteland.

However, with tedious objectives, a halfhearted crafting system, and a non-existent story, The Escapists: The Walking Dead doesn’t quite satisfy what either type of fan might be looking for.

The Escapists: The Walking Dead’s puzzle / survival sim set-up follows the show’s main protagonist, Rick Grimes, through several of the comic’s / TV show’s more famous scenarios. You’re given a primary goal to accomplish (e.g. clear out the barn of all zombies, find the main generator), and must prepare your fellow survivors to aid in completing the task.

It is an officially-licensed title, so fans of the series will be treated to plenty of familiar little touches, from character names to particular plot lines.

In the course of completing the large-scale objectives, players must maintain smaller, more daily routines and complete quests to keep the zombie hordes at bay. I never played The Escapists, but it was well-loved in the “indie” community, but after learning a little about the game, it becomes more clear why The Escapists: The Walking Dead is structured in its very particular way.

The first game took place in a prison, where tasks are regimented and mandatory, and it almost seems like the same should be true in the world of The Walking Dead, but the analogy breaks down and reveals the game’s flaws rather than obscures them.

The world of The Walking Dead is almost like a prison. But it is not a prison. And the difference is much more meaningful than the game wants you to believe. I’m sure you would imagine that the survivors in a zombie apocalypse would attempt to nourish a sense of the mundane, the obligatory, through keeping up rules and the minutiae of everyday life. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to a compelling gaming experience.

Players in the first level, for example, are required do laundry. In the abstract, I understand how that might be practical during an eschatological catastrophe, but it’s problematic in this game for a few reasons. First of all, it deters exploration, because players who fail to meet their daily objectives get penalized, and the threat of a zombie attack increases.

In the metaphorical sense, it would follow that a pack of survivors not keeping up with the day-to-day would invite a zombie attack, but there is almost no direct correlation in this game with, say, doing laundry or cultivating food and the heightened prospect of an attack. I also want to mention that players can go to the gym and work out in each level, and I’m not saying Rick Grimes has never hit a treadmill in all the 150-plus issues of the comic I’ve read, but it just seems oddly and vividly out of place.

Secondly, the daily burdens, like supply runs and working in the kitchen, do not directly benefit or hamper the experiences of the group. That would be an interesting wrinkle in the system Team17 devised. It’s not like working or not working do anything but affect the zombie meter.

They tether the player to a certain location for a certain period of time, but they don’t serve an actual, functional purpose within the game. But what they don’t do is affect the amount of food the players are allowed, or whether or not the players are able to dress themselves in fresh clothes. They are taken from outmoded 8-bit ideas of how game mechanics should function, but The Escapists doesn’t have the ambition to tie everything together in a meaningful way.

The combat, especially where close quarters are concerned, is kind of a joke. Even though it’s probably supposed to be true that fighting off zombies as a single player should be difficult, but it’s just not fun whatsoever. Nor is it difficult in a satisfying way.

The more frustrating part of the combat is that it is imprecise. If you get attacked by a zombie and you’re alone, it doesn’t really matter, because the life meter on the zombie tells you if you’re hitting it or not. Work with a fellow survivor, and it’s nearly impossible to tell if you’re hitting the target with a melee weapon.

The sound effect fires off for a weapon strike whether or not you hit a target, so it’s really difficult to tell what’s going on. Considering that the penalty can be annoying, it makes combat much less enjoyable, to the point that you try to avoid it as much as possible.

To put a finer point on it, let’s say (a) you’re in the middle of combat and (b) there are a few zombie bodies lying around. You click the right mouse button to attack, in most cases. Well, the right mouse also picks up zombie bodies, so if one of them is in your way, then you might incidentally pick one of them up instead of attacking another zombie. It’s completely broken.

The crafting system, too, feels perfunctory in a disappointing way. In most games, the crafting system’s purpose is to help players expand and evolve their surroundings, but the crafting system in The Escapists: TWD only serves to give players items or food, usually. It is less sophisticated than most other survival games, even those with a relatively modest scope.

Sure, there are ways of upgrading items and weapons, but very often players will find what they need in the wild. You might add onto a shotgun, which is helpful, but there are just as many worthless crafting items in the world, too. There is very little to be developed, and very few items require multiple levels of crafting. It’s a pretty simple system, which leaves little to the imagination.

What passes for a story in The Escapists: TWD are scenarios from the show / comics and random lines from the game. The players, even though required to work together, have no real sense of communication. When meeting for breakfast, for example — a REQUIREMENT in the game — players spout non sequiturs but do not actually communicate. There are no dialogue options, and players are merely recruited for minor missions through a simple button press.

Not only that, but there are “essential survivors,” who, if they die, the game’s over. You have to start the scenario over, from the beginning. Nothing goes against the whole idea of The Walking Dead more than this point. Rick Grimes aside, there has never been such a thing as an essential survivor in the world Robert Kirkman created, so having the game stop at a player’s death and automatically restart could not be further from what The Walking Dead is all about.

To make things even stranger, if you, Rick Grimes, die, no big deal. You start over the next morning and continue on with the mission at hand. Your death is most inconsequential. There is almost no penalty for dying, either, which, too, seems to go against the logic of the this world.

It’s all old-school, but not in a very positive way. With a different design, something interesting could have been made of The Escapists: TWD.

I imagine this game is for fans of either survival-based crafting games or fans of The Walking Dead, but I can’t imagine why anyone would choose this game over one of the other good survival games out there: The Long Dark, The Forest, Minecraft, Terraria, the list goes on and on.

The Final Word: All things told, I think I understand why people would want to play a game like The Escapists: The Walking Dead, but I don’t think this is the game that people who would want this game actually want. Wait for The Walking Dead: Michonne, instead.