Clunky, but fun.
The bottom line is that I enjoyed much of the first 2 episodes, but struggled through much of 3 and 4 when the story started to drag for me. Episode 5 wrapped it all up nicely and became the best of the lot. I found myself caring about the characters, which is a good thing for me and a stark contast to recent games like Alan Wake. Luckily the Walking Dead video game series has proven nearly as popular as the television series, so writers are busy working on a sequel.
As a pure story with meaningful characters, the Walking Dead is pretty good. As an adventure game however, it's "meh". Gaming has come a long way since thoughtful classics like The Longest Journey and Dreamfall-- not in a story telling sense, but in the level of interactivity we expect in a game world. The classic adventure game limitations may still work in some settings with some stories, but in a zombie apocalypse universe it just screams to be a shooter/RPG hybrid. Therefore, making the protagonist walk (never run) around at odd camera angles while you mouse-scanned the comic book-like environment became claustrophobic very quickly. I'm not going to pull any punches, it was downright clunky at times and I often wondered why certain interactions were even needed. But the story and characters kept me going nonetheless, and that's half the battle.
While I had issues following install which made the game completely unable to start, within a few days a Steam patch fixed it. No further technical issues were noted. One oddity was that I never figured out how to skip out of the credits or next episode preview-- or skip over long cutscenes after a restart following a clunk-caused death. I'm sure there was a way... Right?
Despite its imperfections, The Walking Dead is more than worth the Steam package deal, but despite my enjoyment, it's not enough to get me to pay full price per episode when season 2 starts rolling out. And in the meantime, maybe we can convince a studio like Obsidian to consider that Walking Dead hybrid shooter/RPG I mentioned?