Now Playing: 400 Days (DLC)

400 Days is a new DLC episode for The Walking Dead. It’s intended to bridge the gap between Season 1 and the upcoming season 2. At 3.99, you get about 50-60 minutes of ‘gameplay’, and I use that term rather cautiously. It connects very, very loosely to events in the ‘core’ game, although how much impact choices you make in 400 days will have in Season 2 remains to be seen.

I rather enjoyed TWD, but it’s not a particularly good ‘game’ as such. As I said in my review, the gameplay is incredibly basic. However, despite this, the core game benefited from an engaging, unfolding narrative and characters we grew to care about. This is something 400 days, due to the way it is presented, lacks. Because there is no ‘story’ as such. What you get is essentially five loosely connected stories. Although ‘stories’ is probably the wrong word. They’re more like snapshots of a specific situation in a character’s life.

They take around 10-15 minutes each to complete and all of them are decent enough to a degree. But due to their short nature, we never really get to know or care about the people involved. Some of the characters do seem pretty interesting, and it’s a credit to the writers that they were able to cram as much characterisation as they did into such a short frame of time, not just for the playable characters, but some of the side characters too.

But will these characters return in Season 2? I hope at least some of them do, hopefully more than just a cameo, or I’d wonder what the point of this episode was exactly. I guess you could just view it as a small (and fairly cheap) bonus to whet our appetites for the next season, but on that front, it actually leaves me a little concerned.

One of the things I wanted to see in Season 2 was an expansion of the gameplay mechanics of 1. More variety. More player interaction. A more branching narrative, featuring choices with real impact. But 400 days doesn’t really have any of that. In fact, it’s even worse than the core game in terms of player interaction. A lot of the five segments play out as little more than extended cut-scenes, requiring the player to push a button occasionally to trigger the next cinematic. There are a few small moments of exploration/investigation, but they are largely pointless. I get that this is only intended to be a small ‘bonus’ episode as such, but still, I sincerely hope this isn’t a sign of how Season 2 is shaping up.

As I said, how 400 days will tie into the second season remains to be seen, but if you’re a fan of the original, I’d say it’s worth ‘playing’, if just for the chance to carry over more personalised choices. But that’s about it really. The writing is good, and it was good to see such a varied cast packed into such little content. There’s some funny stuff too, some (potentially) interesting choices, and overall it’s enjoyable enough. But it really all depends on how it’s followed up on. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

5/10