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New Walking Dead game lets you rewrite the TV series, turn Rick into a zombie

Sorry, I meant ‘walker’

Michael McWhertor is a journalist with more than 17 years of experience covering video games, technology, movies, TV, and entertainment.

Name a more iconic duo than The Walking Dead and choice-based video games. AMC and publisher GameMill Entertainment know there’s no better answer to that prompt, so they’re teaming up for a new choose-your-own-adventure-style action game based on The Walking Dead TV series that sounds intriguing.

The Walking Dead: Destinies, revealed Thursday via IGN, will let players “rewrite the story” of AMC’s live-action adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s zombie comic. Some of the gameplay appears to include third-person action sequences where players take control of set pieces from the show, while others let them alter writers’ decisions. That includes letting Jon Bernthal’s character Shane Walsh murder Rick Grimes, affirming Shane as the leader of the survivors and turning Rick into a zombie. Where that arc might go from there will play out in Destinies.

The Walking Dead: Destinies will span the first four seasons of The Walking Dead TV series, which means players will experience story-altering decisions on the journey to Atlanta, at the Greene family farm, in the prison, and at the nearby fortified town of Woodbury. (Season 4 of The Walking Dead ends on a cliffhanger, with the survivors being trapped at the Terminus.) A trailer for The Walking Dead: Destinies shows players controlling characters like Rick, Daryl, and Glenn, but according to GameMill’s announcement, pretty much every familiar face from the TV show will show up.

The developer of The Walking Dead: Destinies is Flux Games, the studio that develops the Cobra Kai games for GameMill. The studio’s Walking Dead game is in development for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

While The Walking Dead TV series may have concluded after an 11-season run (and an eight-season companion series), the franchise shambles on with multiple spinoffs, including The Walking Dead: Dead City, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, and The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, which will see the return of Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira as Rick and Michonne, respectively.

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