The Walking Dead: Episode 4 - Around Every Corner
Score: 90% Publisher: Telltale Games Developer: Telltale Games Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Previously on The Walking Dead:: The Walking Dead: Episode 4 - Around Every Corner starts off with Lee, Clementine, Kenny and the others they have picked up rolling into Savannah, Georgia after a heart-wrenching train trip from the Motor Inn they had been holding up in. In Episode 3 - Long Road Ahead, the player had to make many tough decisions and very few people from the beginning of that episode survived to see Around Every Corner start. Like the past games, choices you made before will have consequences here and many of the other characters' feelings towards Lee come into play as the group decides exactly how to handle Savannah and Kenny's plan to jump on a boat and find some island to live on.
Savannah: When The Walking Dead: Episode 4 - Around Every Corner opens up, the group is walking into the Georgian city only to find they have to seek cover quickly. When a nearby church bell tolls, all of the walkers in the city seem to flock to the sound and the group finds a house to break into and hide in. The question is, how safe is the house? Could there be walkers in it? Should they stay here or keep on Kenny's plan to find a boat. To make matters worse, Omid's broken leg isn't doing all that great and infection seems to be setting in. While the character wasn't bitten by a zombie, the fact that anyone who dies rises again means that he could be a danger waiting to happen. Kenny's hard-headedness means that he won't let the boat idea die, so he and Lee head to the waterfront to see what they can find. Not only do they discover a fairly empty wharf, but a walled-off section of Georgia called Crawford. As they meet a few new people, including a survivalist named Molly and a group of recovering cancer patients, they learn that Crawford is a neighborhood where anyone who can't pull their own weight, the young and the sick included, are thrown out and left to fend for themselves. Of course, you know at some point, you will have to make your way into the fortified neighborhood and that's the second half of this episode.
Crawford: Without giving away too many details of The Walking Dead: Episode 4 - Around Every Corner, let's just say your group makes their way into the school inside the walled-off section of town and have to fortify themselves against the citizens of Crawford. They have a set list of items they need to recover, including medicine for Omid, gas and a battery. As they explore their little slice of Crawford, they learn a lot about the nature of the neighborhood around them. Like the rest of The Walking Dead, the interesting details about this story aren't the zombies, but how humans react when something like this happens. In this case, its about the decisions this particular group of people made in order to feel safe and secured and survive after the zombie apocalypse. Much like the cannibalistic dairy farmers from Episode 2, it's scary to see the seemingly reasonable decisions normal people can make and where it can take them. If they can survive in the neighborhood, gather what they need and make it back to the house without getting killed, then they should be free and clear right? Well think again, there is still one episode of The Walking Dead left.
Next Time on The Walking Dead: Quite frankly, I don't know what to expect after The Walking Dead: Episode 4 - Around Every Corner. The next, and last episode, is called No Time Left and there was no "next time on" segment at the end of Episode 4 like past episodes. All I really know is everything comes to a head here. By the end of this episode, you and a select group of people from your party, basically the ones that you can convince to come with you, set off on a mission. I can't talk much about the nature of that mission or the complications the group has going into it without revealing some of the major plot events of Around Every Corner. Suffice it to say that, based on the Episode 5 title alone, you can expect Lee and the group to be working against the clock. The Walking Dead has been a bumpy ride that has seriously played with my emotions and given me some troubling decisions to make. While Long Road Ahead was filled pretty much non-stop with heavy choices, Around Every Corner only slackens in intensity slightly. Anyone who has been following the game so far should be champing at the bit for this episode, and quite frankly, it looks like the last part in the series won't disappoint either.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Related Links: The Walking Dead on Steam The Walking Dead Game Home Page Game Vortex’s The Walking Dead Coverage Skybound Home Page
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