The Walking Dead: 400 Days Critic Reviews

The extent of your enjoyment will largely hinge on whether you view 400 Days as an odd footnote to an incredible first season, or as the prologue to an even higher-stakes follow up this Fall.

For now though, if you’re considering picking up that second season 400 Days is damn near essential – and if you’re not, then it may well change your mind.

The Walking Dead: 400 Days is an interactive horror drama at its best.

This two-hour episode introduces players to a quintet of new characters, individual survivors who through random chance spend at least a little time in or around a lonely countryside gas station and diner during the first 400 days of the outbreak.

Even though there's not much time for the player to get attached with the 5 new characters, 400 Days retains all the high quality and great storytelling we're used to by Telltale.

The Walking Dead. 400 Days offers the same great The Walking Dead experience, but this time with a focus on short stories instead of one larger one. Though there still could be some more actual interaction and less watching cutscenes, the quality of writing and experimenting in short story narrative more than makes up for it.

A fantastic return of The Walking Dead, letting Telltale experiment with form without losing any of the magic.

Ultimately, 400 Days is worth playing for invested fans. Telltale has clearly learned the game works best when it presents you with unattractive choices that pull at your humanity.

Even though you'll never spend more than 30 minutes with any of the characters, you'll still find that you're invested in their well-being.

It remains to be seen how well 400 Days ties into Season 2, although it’s certainly implied at the end that your actions here will have some impact. As the epilogue messily ties everything off, it’s hard to say for sure whether 400 Days is an absolutely essential part of the Walking Dead experience, or whether it’s mostly a fantastic reminder that Telltale knows exactly what they’re doing.

The unique anthology style also allows 400 Days to shine on its own, and the brilliantly economic storytelling may even draw some fans to prefer it over the original.

Despite this, The Walking Dead: 400 Days is a worthwhile, bold narrative experiment. It throws away most of the trappings of the adventure game genre that the first season still hung onto; it's more directed, which perhaps makes it less compelling to play, but just as wonderful to experience. If The Walking Dead is more about dialogue and choices than the occasional puzzle and cupboard searching, then 400 Days is an excellent addition to the series.

But the power of The Walking Dead, of developing real, relatable characters and pushing players into tough decisions about how to treat and how to interact with them, is lost to a degree in 400 Days. Without more time spent with each of these characters, and without more context for the decisions players are asked to make, the experience becomes less emotional and more mechanical and cold.

For a fantastic price of £3.99, fans should not hesitate picking up The Walking Dead: 400 Days. It might move at lightning speed, and we might not get the most out of these new characters, but the sense of drama coming from these short stories makes for a tantalising time.

Whatever her motives, 400 Days and indeed The Walking Dead are remarkable achievements simply because they prove that games are capable at spawning thoughts of fundamental debates such as the meaning of life and death.

400 Days is the demonstration that The Walking Dead worked thanks to its episodic nature, or at least to a "not too compressed" narrative rhythms.

Like a "best of" The Walking Dead, 400 Days is brief and exciting, even if it feels a little more like a demo than a game.

Although you’ll need at least Episode One to play 400 Days, this is a good standalone title that expands The Walking Dead universe and pushes the story forward. The situation it sets up for Season Two is intriguing.

400 Days shows the same strengths as the whole first season: The decision are painful! The merciless fight for survival still is depicted brutally honest. Nonetheless this interlude lacks challenge and freedom of action.

400 Days does exactly what a good TV pilot episode should do – catches your interest.