Lee tries to decide which snack to eat while waiting for tech help.

Once again, we here at the Space-Biff! Aerodrome have invited Lee Everett, protagonist of The Walking Dead, to come and review the game for us. Today he’s going to tell us about his experiences with Episode Two: Starved for Help. Take it away, Lee!

Hey there, it’s good to be back.

When I say that, I mean it. You might be thinking, “Yeah, Lee, we believe you.” But the thing is, not everyone’s so good at meaning what they say. And in fact, that’s a lot of what my story’s about today. So sit back and brace yourself—wait, is that even possible? Okay, lean forward and brace yourself, because today I’m going to tell you a truly frightening, truly depressing, and sort of disgusting, tale.

Confession time: I can’t talk about the second episode of The Walking Dead [what? —Ed]. Now now, calm down. I’m here to talk about how hard I tried to play that second episode, and how I still haven’t for reasons beyond my control.

See, when Telltale Games said I was going to be in a second episode, they posted a nice trailer that made me really dread what that episode was going to put me through. It looked harrowing. It looked like I would have to make a pile of hard decisions. It looked like this:

Harrowing zombie apocalypse action.

The problem was, when I tried to launch the game, it looked more like this:

Yeah, as in, nothing.

The game wouldn’t launch, even after a reboot and many repeated tries. Fair enough, I figured. This is the PC, after all, and we pay for our superiority by being expected to fix our own problems some of the time. With great power, etc.

So I went about figuring a way to fix things. I tried running it as an administrator. Fail. I tried a different compatibility mode. No dice. After another reboot or two, I finally stumbled on a combination of running it as an administrator, using Windows XP/ME compatibility, and praying really hard. The game launched. I gave a silent fist-pump, noted that it had launched in a 1024×768 window rather than my native full-screen resolution, waited for the splash screen to fade, clicked the superfluous “Click to Continue” button, and pressed play.

And then I saw that all my save files were missing. I exited (after adjusting the silly windowed resolution) and checked my folder. Sure enough, my save files were safe and sound.

Thinking that maybe I needed a reboot and a relaunch, I tried that. Still no luck. I tried copying my save files to the other directory, which also did not work. I searched online and found the Telltale Games forum filled with others having similar problems, including reports that Tech Support wasn’t responding to emails. I decided to send an email of my own.

This apparently never happened.

The good news is that I didn’t have to choose which of my friends would live, or who gets food rations and who starves. I didn’t have to kill any zombies. I didn’t have to worry after Clementine.

The bad news is that I’m surprised at this company’s lack of service and integrity. Days on, and I’m still starved for help. Tech help.

Yeah yeah, I ended with some bad wordplay. Couldn’t end on much of anything else though.