Two men enter the Nest of Vipers, one man leaves
CAUTION: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FIFTH EPISODE IN TELLTALE’S GAME OF THRONES SERIES
Compromise is a complex idea. Sometimes, it’s seen as a strength—compassionate love is often a compromise between two people finding a middle ground on which they can build a relationship. (Call it the Ned-Catelyn dynamic; this is Game of Thrones, after all.) But in war, compromise can be a weakness, even if it results in peace. Surrendering values your nation holds most dear in order to seek an elusive, slippery, untenable peace may not be worth it. To some, even compromising values within yourself is undesirable. After all, broken bones can be easily mended, but righting yourself after you’ve bent over backwards for someone is much more difficult.
The fifth episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones videogame series, “A Nest of Vipers,” is all about compromise. Asher Forrester accepts a compromise from Daenerys; he doesn’t get the Second Sons, but he does get the chance to prove his worth to former pit fighters (a notoriously uncompromising group) who may serve well as an army for House Forrester against the Whitehills. Gared Tuttle and Sylvi the wildling are forced into compromise by a White Walker attack with grave consequences that could potentially become even more fatal down the line. Caught between the Lannister siblings, Mira Forrester seeks compromise with one or the other, as her allies in King’s Landing slowly drift away from her. Even Ramsay Snow, a man not known for being gracious, steps away from the Forrester-Whitehill conflict: “Last house standing, wins.”
But the episode is driven in large part by Asher and Rodrik Forrester, and their stories both reach mini-climaxes of sorts before the tragic final scene. Though Asher’s pit fight is typical Asher action-combat (he’s had a few more fighting sequences than the rest of the family, of course), he gets to do something rather atypical and deliver a speech to go along with his victory. Meanwhile, Rodrik comforts Elaena as her family suffers the consequences of helping the Forresters, and he brings renewed comfort to his family as he finally deals with the traitor in Ironrath, symbolically throwing his cane into the fire as a sign of his own strength.
Structurally, it makes perfect sense to place these two stories in parallel. As one Forrester finds his voice (and perhaps takes the first step to becoming a great leader), the other rips the bandages off old wounds and prepares for the fights ahead of him, which means that the decision in the final scene is all the more impossible to make. Perhaps it’s not such a big deal for the individual player, as each one will have their own preferences (as of this writing, 47% chose to leave Asher behind), but in the grand scheme of the story, choosing whether to sacrifice one of the main characters is not fun.
But making that decision is well within the established parameters of Game of Thrones. This is, after all, the penultimate episode of this season; by forcing players to make an impossible decision, the game aligns itself with the show, where penultimate episodes usually meant game-changing events—Ned’s beheading, Blackwater Bay, the Red Wedding, the Battle on the Wall, the one-two punch of Shireen’s burning and the Harpy uprising in Meereen (and Dany’s subsequent dragon-flight). In this way, Telltale revels in opportunity to link itself to the television show it springs from. It’s all well and good when you can get the actors to reprise their roles for an entirely different medium, and to do a version of the iconic opening credits sequence. But capturing the structural storytelling that has helped the show gain millions upon millions of viewers over the course of five years? That’s a recipe for a high-caliber game. If the finale is as good as this episodes, Telltale’s Game of Thrones series may go down as one of the developer’s finest achievements.