game of thrones a telltale games series ending

So the sort of game that Telltale is known for is fundamentally opposed to the setting of Game of Thrones. But you’d never voluntarily trade places with any of them. You might like some of them or even partially identify with some characteristic of theirs. When you watch the show or read the books you don’t want to be the characters, you want to see what happens to them. Game of Thrones is brutal and cruel and unrelenting. Game of Thrones does not do this, and never has. In The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars you want to be the heroes, despite the dangers they face, because their lives are cool and exciting. Lots of fantasy universes on television and in books rely on audience identification to draw viewers and readers in and to make them want to actually be in the universe they’ve created. It just also means that the very premise of a game like this set in the Game of Thrones universe is maybe not as enticing as you might think. I do think that this means the game is a success: it accomplishes what you would expect such a game to accomplish. “It just also means that the very premise of a game like this set in the Game of Thrones universe is maybe not as enticing as you might think.” But constant depression doesn’t exactly make for enjoyable gameplay. Maybe that’s a good thing, since the television series (and the books, of course) have also not done much to make Westeros and Essos look like inviting vacation destinations. It’s not particularly fun being in Game of Thrones, it turns out.

And so about a third of the way through the series, when it starts to become clear that things are headed in a pretty solid direction whether you want them to or not, you start to rebel against the world you’ve been dropped into. By forcing you to click on various mundane objects and actually walk the characters around the screen and decide how they react in many many dialogue trees, you feel like you actually are the characters. Martin’s fantasy universe succeeded in capturing the endless futility that is so characteristic of the series and, through the intense identification that comes with controlling and making choices for the characters in the game, actually makes you as hopeless as everyone else.

Game of thrones a telltale games series ending