![]() ![]() ![]() Less easy to excuse is the same sense of fatigue and futility that made the TV series stagnate between the destruction of the CDC in the Season 1 finale and the introduction of Abraham and Eugene in Season 4. While it strains credulity that an 11-year-old gets to go on every expedition and overhear every exchange, our preinstalled affection for Clementine makes the narrative hurdles the game has to clear to keep her in the foreground relatively easy to overlook. ![]() ![]() As the lone carryover member of the main cast early in Season 2, and one of only two Season 1 staples to appear in anything close to the complete arc, Clementine carries a heavy narrative load, serving as the constant in a world where other characters come and go (often as a result of being disemboweled). It’s an effective formula, employed in the past by Ico and other classics, that activates twice as many instincts: survival and parental.Īt the end of Season 1, though, Telltale took a risk, transferring control, both figuratively and literally, from Lee to Clementine and stripping away the source of that protective impulse (until restoring it, in an even more manipulative and transparent form, when a baby enters the picture in Season 2’s penultimate episode). (In both the television and “good” video-game versions of The Walking Dead, 2 for instance, a trip to the supermarket becomes a set piece instead of a routine task.) Season 1 intensified its setting’s already elevated stakes by putting the player in charge of an adorable NPC’s safety. Storytellers and spectators are so fond of postapocalyptic settings because they imbue otherwise mundane dilemmas and decisions with built-in import and emotional resonance. That’s the challenge Telltale faced in Season 2 of the series, which concluded last week with its fifth installment, perhaps pointedly titled “No Going Back.” Hooked after one high, the audience demands even more mic-dropping moments and is let down by anything less. 1Īfter a particularly memorable mic drop, of course, an artist has every incentive to tiptoe back onto the stage to retrieve the mic after the spectators disperse. While the final scenario wasn’t surprising - the difficult choice it asked the player to make, or one like it, loomed on the horizon throughout the first four episodes - it was so well executed, and so well set up, that two years later I’m still scared to spoil it. After 10-plus hours of playtime, the five-part 2012 title culminated in a devastating, role-reversing scene between the two central characters around whom its universe revolved: Lee, the decisive, responsible adult, and Clementine, the cute, dependent kid. Season 1 of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games’ multiplatform episodic adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s endlessly recyclable series, ended with an emotional mic drop. ![]()
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