Telltale’s “Iron from Ice” story review–SPOILERS

The first episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones game has been released to positive reviews, including ours. But while early reviews can give you an idea for the shape of the game, they’re also not likely to include a full discussion of its story, due to spoilers. But “Iron from Ice” is all story, and it has some pretty impressive storytelling decisions that we’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss.

So if you’ve played the episode, or if you don’t care about spoilers, read on. Everyone else: Telltale’s Game of Thrones spoilers ahoy! And if you don’t know what all the fuss is about check out our Frequently Asked Questions.

Now, let’s talk about the game’s big decisions and twists….

Telltale does something extremely clever with “Iron from Ice” right off the bat: it starts at the Red Wedding. This quickly makes the game feel authentic–yep, that looks like the Stark camp outside The Twins!–and it allows it to give the Forresters their own Red Wedding, quickly offing Lord Forrester and his firstborn son and heir, Rodrik. “All right,” I thought while playing this, “you’ve killed some supposedly major characters right off the bat, and made it clear that you’re Game of Thrones.”

The deaths of the two Forrester patriarchs also aligns Game of Thrones with Telltale’s other games, particularly both seasons of The Walking Dead. In those, you play as Lee, a black felon and his ward, Clementine, a young mixed-race girl. Even after the apocalypse, these are still not the dominant figures in society. Likewise, instead of playing the long-time leaders and war heroes of the Forrester clan, you play the characters who were never supposed to be heroes: the eldest daughter Mira Forrester; the lowborn squire Gared Tuttlel, and the thirdborn adolescent Forrester son, Ethan, who’s been thrust into the lordship. Gared and Mira are interesting, but the game seems to want to make it clear that they’re there to give a perspective on different parts of the world, with Mira filling a Sansa-like role in King’s Landing, for example.

Ethan, meanwhile, seems to fit the Bran Stark role, at least before Theon took Winterfell. He’s the “young lord” of Ironrath, suddenly called upon to be a leader when he had been a cheerful, carefree lad beforehand. This fits Game of Thrones and Telltale–just as The Walking Dead did with Clementine, it made it fairly clear that my moral choices involving Ethan Forrester would determine how he would grow up as a lord.

So I thought everything was set: “we’ve had our big plot twist deaths, subverting expectations, and we’ve set up a typical Telltale game system for me to work within. Looks good!”

Then Ramsay motherfuckin’ Snow shows up and stabs Ethan Forrester in goddamn neck and “HOLY SHIT did that really just happen?” Yes, yes it did. And, a few seconds of thought made me realize: “that was brilliant.”

Here’s why: first, there’s a total subversion of expectations. Game of Thrones the show subverted those expectations by killing its traditional heroes in Ned and Robb, but in doing so, it also set up certain rules about who would die, when a point-of-view character could die, and so on. Telltale killed their Ned and Robb early on, and seemed to work within those rules–then they killed their Bran.

That would be one thing, but it wasn’t just Game of Thrones tropes they were engaging with, it was also Telltale’s own. Ethan is portrayed very similarly to their main Walking Dead character, the girl Clementine. In both seasons of TWD, the overarching thematic focus beyond the “survival” plot is: how will Clementine grow up? Will she be strong enough to survive, but still good-hearted enough to deserve to survive? Ethan appears to fit that exact role perfectly–and then boom, dagger to the throat.

The sudden death also serves to strengthen the character of Ramsay Snow for people who’ve only seen the HBO show, instead of merely reading the books. Since he was moved from Season 2 to Season 3, he’s been almost exclusively associated with torturing and breaking Theon, less so in interacting with the wider world. Iwan Rheon still plays him with full villainy, but it’s an impressive reminder to see just how terrifying he can be outside of the Dreadfort. (Along those lines, it was also good to see Tyrion again, before his desperate fugitive days.)

Finally, it subverts expectations of episodic storytelling structure. We can deal with one twist, sure. They happen in high-plot stories like Game of Thrones all the time. But putting a second big twist shatters that comfortable sense of security a savvy viewer might have. The thing is, this requires a story with all its characters’ stories together. (The Vampire Diaries’ heyday was where I first noticed the two-twist strategy.) It wouldn’t necessarily work for Game of Thrones the show, because its different scenes are almost always from different storylines. But the game specifically attempts to tie its three distinct threads together, so Ethan’s murder descends directly from Lord Forrester’s death.

One of the great misconceptions about Game of Thrones is that it’s popular because it kills characters (or worse, it’s popular “despite” killing characters). What makes GoT actually special is that it uses character deaths unpredictably, in ways that go against conventional fantasy and television tropes. But by doing this, it’s created its own set of tropes. Telltale’s Game of Thrones could have simply adopted those and been a good adaptation of Game of Thrones by the letter–indeed, that’s what it was for its first 95%. But by dropping that second twist in there, by killing its apparent moral center, Telltale got both the letter and the spirit of Game of Thrones right. 

• Published on 12/04/2014 at 8:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 12/04/2014 at 8:00 AM CDT