The first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead revitalized the adventure game genre by creating a world where it felt as if your actions as Lee Everett really mattered. Lee was desperately trying to survive the zombie-infested world of Robert Kirkman’s popular comic universe while trying to protect a helpless little girl named Clementine from the dangers of that world. It was important who Lee trusted, what he said to people and who he helped to live or die. The game earned rave reviews and rightly earned numerous Game Of The Year awards in 2012. It was always going to be a tough act to follow but when Season Two was announced in last October, no-one doubted that Telltale Games would be able pull it off: a belief that they seemingly shared as they’ve decided to go out on a (severed) limb with this latest installment, turning the game on its head and putting the player in the shoes of an unlikely hero: a nine-year old girl – Clementine.
Playing as little Clementine as opposed to the tall, strong Lee gives the whole game a different atmosphere. No longer can you take on a few zombies single-handed. Instead you are far more likely to have to run from threats rather than tackle them head on. However, this doesn’t mean that Clementine can’t hold her own: she just has to find smarter ways to survive.
Clem is bright, intelligent and brave, but she is still only a little girl and she is desperate and scared a lot of the time. The game does a great job of making you realize this by placing you in situations it frequently seems as though there is no way you can come out of the predicament alive; each time you survive an encounter, it feels like a real achievement.
The game is delivered in the same episodic format as Season One with Episode One available now, with the remaining four due over the course of the next few months. This gives the game the same “what happens next?” feeling of a major TV drama. The presentation is carried through with TV-style opening and closing credits along with a “Previously on The Walking Dead” recap at the beginning of each installment. The graphics improve on Season One while still keeping the comic book style art direction. Meanwhile, music and voice acting are both as compelling and impressive as they were in before, with the music in particular providing great additional drama to the game’s big moments.
The Walking Dead is a game of choices and primarily those choices play out through conversations with other characters and through “point and click” style item discovery/interaction. How you reply in conversations will affect how people treat you and can change how the game unfolds drastically. Treat someone kindly and they might be on your side, be snide with them and they’re more likely to distrust you. Not all decisions will be crucial though, in fact after playing through twice it seems some are purely for the sake of giving you varied things to say rather than changing what will happen. Item interaction is fairly straightforward in this season debut: you’ll try to find all the items you need in an area and eventually one item will either trigger a new part of the story or will give you the tools to do so. Some items do nothing of use though, something which does slow things down a bit considering you often need to check everything on screen. Season One occasionally limited the time you had to find items, which could change things later on; this hasn’t happened so far, but then it’s early days yet so things may change in this regard.
It’s not all jibber-jabber and picking things up though; this is The Walking Dead after all. You’ll need to survive attacks both from Walkers (the universe’s name for zombies) and from the living. In Episode One these attacks generally see Clementine trying to flee from her pursuers and to do so you’ll need to swiftly move out of the way using quick time events or grab improvised weapons like rocks, bricks or tree-branches and use them to fend off your attackers. These sequences are really well done and allow for some excellent set pieces full of fear, panic and desperation.
Season One’s story was one of the strongest in recent game history; pleasingly, Season Two picks up almost immediately where the first one left off, both in narrative and quality. Cleverly, if you’ve got a Season One save game on your system it can be imported so that all of your previous decisions carry over, giving a seamless transition between the two games and heightening the feeling that this is your version of The Walking Dead. This means that when you are given a “Previously on…” video at the beginning of the game it shows what you chose, not what the developer might consider canon as other games sometimes do. It’ll be interesting to see if your Season One choices change anything about the game in future episodes; for now, it acts as a useful reminder of how things panned out last time.
This is a great return for the franchise, giving you so much of what was good about the first game without feeling like they’re covering the same ground. Just like a good DVD box set, each episode of Season One filled you with so much desire to know the fate of the characters you cared so deeply about that it made you want to play the next one immediately. Season Two: Episode One is no different, and we can’t wait to find out what happens next for Clementine.
Richard Moran
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