http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/arts/video-games/video-game-review-game-of-thrones-iron-from-ice.html 2014-12-04 01:16:38 Video Game Review: Game of Thrones — Iron From Ice Iron From Ice is the first installment of a video game based on the TV show “Game of Thrones.” === To a viewer of prestige cable, Iron From Ice, the first episode of And yet, judged by this installment in a projected six-episode series, Game of Thrones is going to be a good video game, possibly even great. That’s because the designers at Telltale Games have gotten the interactive elements right. What matters most in a video game, unlike in a TV drama, is the choosing. A good shooter game forces a player to make countless small decisions under threat of virtual death. Those choices lead to what players call immersion, the sense of falling into another world. Game of Thrones isn’t a shooter. (Its snooze-worthy action scenes, in fact, allow the player only one choice: Respond properly to an on-screen prompt, or die.) But its immersive appeal is similar. Here, the intensity and pressure occur not during firefights but during conversations. And your words matter, because, as everyone knows, in “Game of Thrones,” everyone is at risk of death, all the time. Telltale’s masterpiece is Iron From Ice owes much to The Walking Dead game, but it also faces, in some ways, a stiffer challenge. This game is adapted less from “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the fantasy series by George R. R. Martin, than from the “Game of Thrones” TV version, which HBO has licensed to Telltale. Iron From Ice begins outside the so-called The game benefits in certain ways from this arrangement: We hear and see the voices and likenesses of the actors who play Lannisters and Tyrells and other Westeros plotters, including Peter Dinklage as Tyrion. But I was often drawn out of the fiction when a prominent visage from television appeared in Teltale’s game, because I began comparing the game unfavorably with the show. Unlike Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones feels supplementary to the television show rather than competitive with it. Still, the main characters in the game are entirely new. The player is given a shifting perspective in the House of Forrester, a hitherto obscure Westeros family apparently mentioned in “A Dance With Dragons,” the fifth of Mr. Martin’s novels. The Forresters are an ersatz Stark clan, the heroic family that most “Game of Thrones” viewers root for. In Iron From Ice, you play as a squire who is banished to the Wall (much like Jon Snow), a handmaiden navigating the treacherous politics of King’s Landing (much like Sansa Stark), and a young lord learning how to rule after his father’s death (a mixture of Robb and Bran Stark). The perspectives and the politicking help to make the game’s conversations feel more like strategy and less like self-expression. The player must persuade others — through trickery, lies, bluffs, threats and even well-chosen truths — rather than just blurt out whatever option comports with how the game makes you feel at the moment. Can you convince Cersei Lannister that your loyalties are with the king? Should you get Margaery Tyrell to appeal on your behalf to King Joffrey? No matter what you choose, I suspect that the plot remains largely the same, except with different characters taking similar actions. That trick is how Telltale has kept its previous games from branching too widely. Some players argue that this means the decisions in Telltale’s games don’t matter, because they don’t open into practically limitless vistas of possibility. But if it doesn’t matter to you if someone in a story rises or falls, or lives or dies, then the failing is not one of choice or plotting but of character. And Game of Thrones, like the television show whose name it shares, is a game with characters worth caring about. Game of Thrones was developed for major consoles and Windows PC. Versions for mobile devices and Mac computers are coming soon. Iron From Ice is rated M (Mature, for players 17 and older) for violence and swearing.