brace yourself: it’s clemen-timeOf. There it is, right in the stomach. You probably didn’t need us to tell you, given the sucker punch that Telltale laid on us at the end of the first season of this post-apocalypse, comic bookinspired trawl, but by the end of this jaunt’s fifth and final episode you’ll get a fistful of emotion square in the gut.
That final episode is far and away the series’ highlight, a crescendo to which it builds with steadily increasing tension but never at the cost of good pacing. You are 11-year-old clementine, one time charge of Lee everett, now tasked with staying alive in the bleakest of end times as part of a mostly new group of survivors. but what makes this season so great are the choices you’re faced with.
There’s a clarity here that ensures they almost always carry an incredible weight. That lucidity is rarely moral. You’ll hardly ever feel straight up regret for having chosen a particular option, as you’ll be able to mentally weigh up the consequences without having them spelled out. You will, however, almost certainly feel guilt. In fact guilt seems to be a recurring theme throughout, culminating in the final moments. What does clem have to do to become proficient enough to survive in this world, both physically and mentally? What does she have to lose? Depending on your ending, a whole lot. And you’ll never forget that it was all down to you.
“thIs naIls the Balance Between character-Building Interludes and unforgettable action”Pace maker
because that’s the other aspect to these decisions. You as the player ownthem.
There are the occasional no brainers the choice between saving a baby or not, for example but for the most part the eventual path you take is determined on a personal level, by how much you’ve read from the characters around you and from how you individually want clem to respond. This leads to plenty of debates between real life friends, but also to an eventual ending (one of several) which is inherently yours. It’s a closenes which feels deeply unnerving as it should in a way that no jumpscare horror game has managed to tap into so well.
This, more than any other Telltale offering, nails the balance between slow,
character-building interludes and unforgettable, devastating action. Sure, your interactions may not be complex, being fairly binary choices of dialogue options backed up by the occasional QTe, but the excellent writing straps a breeze block of heft to every setpiece.
It’s not perfect. The whole thing gets off to a slow start, perhaps a knock-on effect of the climatic season one finale, and a few characters don’t feel very well fleshed out. A few even die or leave pretty much as soon as you learn their names in predictable redshirt fashion. but on the flip side, perhaps this is another effect of what we’re turning clementine into, a sign that she is becoming emotionally distant to new
faces to ensure their potential deaths don’t cut too deeply…
It’s been tough to get through this review without dishing out spoilers, but hopefully you’ll take away the following truth chunk. Somehow, inexplicably, Telltale has managed to outdo itself. It’s made what could have been a tricky follow-up into a masterclass of emotional storytelling in games. The Walking Dead:Season 2