We call Telltale games point and click adventures, but are they? Anyone can look at The Walking Dead and tell that it has very little in common with games like King’s Quest and Maniac Mansion . Point and Click adventure games are all about solving puzzles which sometimes amount to rubbing object A on thing B until you figure out what the developers intended. Still, they’re pretty fun. Telltale games don’t really have any of this. You have an inventory but usually this inventory just lets you make different decisions in dialogue down the line.
Others have called Telltale games “cinematic” games, which is the same label that has been given to games like Heavy Rain, but even that doesn’t seem incredibly accurate. Cinematic games don’t give you too much choice and they are played through a series of quicktime events. Heck, even walking around and exploring the world around you is done through quicktime events. Telltale games are more about dialogue and choice making. Sure, there are quick time events but most of what you are doing is talking and making choices about where to go and what to do next. Much of that “doing” happens on auto pilot. You don’t drive a car to a location in The Wolf Among Us , for example. You just choose to do it and the game does it for you.
Whenever we talk about games, we have to talk about game mechanics. What is the thing that makes you keep playing, or more to the point, how do you play the game in the first place? If you asked anyone, the major gameplay mechanic in Telltale’s games is choice making. Heck, it’s even highlighted at the end of every chapter. You get to see that you and X% of all other gamers made the choices you did. The lose state is either when you die or when your decisions produce an outcome that you didn’t want. The game is about manipulating your surroundings even when you have very little power.
We haven’t seen very many games like this in the past but we are seeing them come up in the future. Square-Enix’s newest game, Life is Strange is looking to be very much the same. It’s all going to be about choice and consequence. You see how your choices affect the world, and then, if you don’t like them, you can time travel back. Doing so, however, will alter the world even more. Once again, this seems very familiar to a Telltale game.
Compare this to another recently released point and click adventure game, Broken Age . Broken Age feels a lot like older Sierra games more than anything else. The game tasks you to find the right items and talk to the right people to proceed onward. It’s more of a puzzle than anything else.
So I posit this: Telltale games has essentially made an entirely new genre of game. It’s not quite cinematic, but it’s not quite a point and click adventure either. It’s a game about making choices and seeing those choice’s consequences. It’s all about meaningful choice. Maybe you could call it a “choice game” or perhaps a “consequence game?” Either way, I think it’s something new, and now that companies other than Telltale are dabbling in it, perhaps we can really say it’s a genre that stands on its own.
What do you think? Are Telltale games their own genre? Let us know in the comments.