“Iron from Ice” review: Telltale Games nail the Game of Thrones experience
Telltale’s Game of Thrones adventure game license gives it a big strength, and a big question mark. The strength: it can instantly set a mood just by bringing in a character, an event, or a setting from the TV show. The question: can it do those justice? Can it be good enough to be an almost pure story spinoff from the HBO series? Can it avoid just being a reference to the series and actually engage with the core themes and structures of Game of Thrones? And most importantly: can it take advantage of both its GOT license and its status as a video game to be good at both?
The answer to all these questions through most of “Iron from Ice” (the first episode of six) is a clear, if somewhat quiet, “yes.” By the end, the answer is a ringing endorsement that yes, this game is on the right track to be both a fine example of what a Game of Thrones game and a Telltale game should be. It’s not perfect, but its flaws are all what you’d expect from a first episode, and its strengths in place, ready to get even better as the series goes on.
If you’re interested in more about the game, check out our FAQ here, and a list of release dates for different systems here. Full review after the jump….
The initial big suprise I had when playing “Iron from Ice” was that the characters weren’t attached to each episode, as I’d thought when it was announced that there would be five playable characters across six episodes. Instead, much like Game of Thrones itself, it switches between point-of-view characters from scene-to-scene. There are three in this episode, two in the North, one in King’s Landing.
Initially I was somewhat dubious about this idea. On one hand, it allowed you to see the world from multiple perspectives and, in a move that I’ve been extremely excited about ever since I saw it in this summer’s Divinity: Original Sin, it allowed you to potentially create situations where characters that the player controls take different sides in different arguments.
In this case, this means a division between what the various members of House Forrester should be able to do after the Red Wedding. The Forresters were Stark loyalists, but suddenly find themselves weakened and at the mercy of the new Wardens in the North, House Bolton, and more directly, their local rivals, Bolton bannermen House Whitehall. The bulk of “Iron from Ice” consists of your characters trying to figure out how they can deal with the near-total reversal of fortunes. One character in King’s Landing may encourage a diplomatic solution, while one in Ironrath, the homestead of House Forrester, may take a more confrontational path. The climax occurs when Ramsay Snow, voiced by Iwan Rheon, arrives to decide House Forrester’s fate.
On the other hand, the multiple player characters can lead to a few cases where the scenes in question feel disconnected. In the most obvious of these, a character riding along the Kingsroad runs into Ramsay Snow, and sees him flaying a random character. Perhaps for people who don’t watch the TV series or need a reminder, this is a good way to establish the Bastard of Bolton as a true villain, but apart from that, the scene feels more like a distraction.
But then Telltale uses its multiple important characters like George R.R. Martin does, with some used for information and some used for audience investment and some used to shatter audience expectations. It’s the last of those that’s most important—those character profiles Telltale released? As with everything else in Westeros, don’t get too attached.
As with most Telltale episodes, this is a game focused on writing and player decisions than on typical “game.” If you’ve played The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, there are way fewer quick-time events where you might be killed for being too slow, and no real puzzles to speak of. This is a game where the difficulty is almost entirely based on tough choices that you’re forced to make. And, in a really impressive fashion, the choices are often actually difficult. Beyond the general video game choice of helping one character or another, Telltale’s Game of Thrones benefits from its license and setting tremendously. First, the multiple characters and multiple settings each provide different possibilities. What helps Margaery Tyrell in King’s Landing won’t necessarily help with events in the North, and negotiating that is ambiguous in the very best way.
Second, and more importantly, the characters in the Game of Thrones help the Game of Thrones game immensely by disrupting normal expectations of how video games are supposed to work—and, I’d suggest they’re only able to do this by subverting expectations in the way that Game of Thrones subverts them. Cersei’s famous “you win or you die” line is, to some extent, a call to ruthlessness as a means to “win.” But as the game begins at the end of the third season, cruelty more than ruthlessness seems the path to victory. Characters like Joffrey Baratheon, Cersei Lannister, and Ramsay Snow are not simply antagonists who can be countered and manipulated; they are powerful, intelligent, capricious villains.
The moment when “Iron from Ice” hits its stride is the moment when that conflict between video game expectations—where you can manipulate systems in order to achieve victory—hits Game of Thrones rules where, as Cersei famously said, “power is power.” So there you are, playing a character under Cersei’s gaze, facing her demands, knowing a more sympathetic character’s advice, wondering “what can I do?” The natural response for a player of the game is to avoid or dismiss the question, and Telltale provides that option. But everyone in the room—Tyrion, Margaery, and Cersei—are smart enough to see that you’re evading, and they will pin you down for a response. You simply don’t know what will work with these villains, and you can’t game the system because, as any viewer of the show will know, they don’t operate according to any system.
In other games, when you’re given moral choices like this, the characters on the other end will generally respond rationally—if not as characters, then according to game logic. But game logic and Game of Thrones are fundamentally incompatible when it comes to characters like Ramsay or Cersei…and yet the Telltale game makes you choose anyway, which leads to a triumph of an ending. The show’s characters are used not merely to create authenticity, but their personalities—and player expectation of their personalities—are used to take simple decisions and turn them complex.
In a technical sense, Telltale’s Game of Thrones succeeds via its simplicity. This is not a major game company that can throw money at graphical issues, and that shows a bit, especially with the show characters’ faces (apart from Tyrion, always looking good despite the scar). But the game generally uses a watercolor aesthetic that makes everything in front of you feel important, but objects, scenery, and characters in the distance are attractively abstract. It feels like the game knows that players probably know what’s supposed to be represented, and so puts out a good-looking symbolic representation of that countryside or architecture, and that’s sufficient—and it is. Perhaps the best and most amusing example of this is its intro–it takes the low-polygon Game of Thrones intro and makes it even more stylized.
Finally, even as the game doesn’t have big exploration- or puzzle-based sections, it does utilize the simple fact of placing the player character within the world of Westeros in order to make the setting feel lived-in. Here there are fighters training for battle, there, you see servants preparing for their nobles, and you can interact with them.
And then…and then at the end Telltale’s Game of Thrones adventure game pulls a move that takes advantage of every damn thing the world created by George R.R. Martin has to offer. Yes, some of the preparation in getting to that point is awkward, but the story itself suggests that it had to be done that way, and it’s hard to imagine it being a better Game of Thrones story. I cannot wait for the second episode.
The events and ending of this episode are…notable. Look for a spoiler discussion here very soon!
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