The Walking Dead games follow the same point-and-click adventure game approach that other Telltale Games episodic series have followed. Within an episode, the player controls a protagonist as the story progresses through several scenes. Within a scene, the player can move the character to explore the area, examine items, and initiate conversation trees with non-player characters; in these dialogs, the player has the option of selecting a number of options to reply to characters, including the option to stay silent. Other scenes are based on cinematic elements using quick time events in which the player must hit a controller button or a keyboard command as indicated on screen to react to an event. Failure to do so in time can lead to the character's death or other undesirable ending, and the game will restart just prior to these scenes.
All choices made by the player in The Walking Dead are tracked by the game, and certain choices ("determinants") will influence later scenes across the episodes and the series to date, when the player continues from the same saved game state. For example, in the first episode of the first season, the player has an option to save one of two non-player characters from a walker attack; the other character is killed, while the surviving character will uniquely impact other aspects of the story. Other times, selection of certain dialog options will influence the attitude of a non-player character towards the protagonist, and can manifest in later scenes as providing additional options for the player to select from. Telltale Games tracks these decisions, including five main choices made during the course of each episode, allowing players to compare their choices to others.