The Romantic Dead

I wrote a little bit last week about my experience with TellTale's The Walking Dead and the rise of what I've come to call "film-games." In that post, I also talked about The Last of Us, another of my favorite games of all time. The two games share a surprising amount of similarities (while feeling like entirely different games), but one that particularly catches my attention is that both are works of Neo-Romanticism.

"That's Not a Game!"

A couple nights ago around 2 a.m., I finally finished season 1 of The Walking Dead by Telltale Games. When I credits stopped rolling and the epilogue tag showing little Clementine alone in the countryside faded out, I stumbled in daze back to my bed. Before I could roll over to sleep, I couldn't resist the impulse to put my arm around my sleeping wife and hold her tight for a moment. Perhaps more than any other media I've ever encountered, The Walking Dead opened my eyes to my relationships with other people, especially my wife and family. I was intensely grateful for the love I've been so lucky to feel throughout my life, and the forces of order that have made the path of my life relatively smooth and easy. As I felt all this, I concluded that The Walking Dead is really one of the greatest games I've ever played.

Except there's one problem. The Walking Dead isn't a game.