Despite it being one of my more anticipated releases of 2014 I managed to make it all the way through 2014 without playing Season 2 of TellTale's The Walking Dead. I'm playing it now though! One year strong after everyone else stopped caring about it! Well screw those people, everything becomes interesting again as soon as it's discounted on PlayStation Plus.
Anyway this post will be updated and amended as I play through the chapters, so at the time I'm writing this very sentence even I don't know what I think of the game yet! But I will point out here there will be SPOILERS so don't venture any further if you don't want key plot points or decisions revealed.
Here we go!
Episode 1 - ALL THAT REMAINS
Oh god I don't want to talk about it.
Well, obviously I do. Complaining about things is usually more fun and engaging from a writer's perspective, but I had to force myself to play Episode 2 immediately after this one just to ensure I didn't give up on this entire thing. If I had stopped here it might have been difficult for me to push myself back into the fray.
it's not incompetent; Clementine is well characterised as being smarter for the events of the first season, but still young and unprepared for the world around her in many ways. TellTale games still run like they're programmed for a hypothetical PS2/Gamecube/Xbox hybrid console and are incompatible with any modern system, but at least it's not the constantly near-crashing stuttering train wreck the first season was on PS3 (HEY TELLTALE, I SEE YOU PICKING UP THOSE BIG GAME OF THRONES AND MINECRAFT FRANCHISES, MAYBE PUMP SOME OF THAT CASH INTO A NEW ENGINE ALREADY??). And I do happen to like some of the new characters in it just fine, like Luke, Luke's cool, I'm okay with Luke.
The problem is this episode is really really manipulative, both emotionally AND mentally. Perhaps it felt it had to be to follow the success of the first season, but it is what it is, and what it is isn't very nice.
The episode starts (after a janky barely functioning montage of clips recapping the first season) with Clementine travelling with Omid and extremely pregnant Christa also known as the "nice guys who got away" from last time around. After a brief tutorial of Clementine bumbling around a bathroom she's confronted by a desperate scavenger, stuff happens, Omid enters the scene, Omid gets shot.
Omid dies.
Christa shoots the scavenger in revenge, the scavenger dies.
The game jumps forward 16 months, Christa and Clementine are sitting around a campfire looking incredibly miserable. Christa is obviously not pregnant any more, but there's no baby to be seen.
We can probably assume the baby died.
Dudes attack them, at least one (probably more) of said dudes gets murdered. Clementine and Christa get separated, this episode doesn't tell us what happened to Christa. Clementine means a dog that's way too cute to not get killed (first thing I thought). After finding some food the dog begs, I chose to give it some food which led to the dog savagely mauling Clementine despite seeming perfectly domesticated. Clementine kicks the dog off her, she soon discovers she has accidentally impaled the dog on some tent posts.
The player then has the choice to abandon the dog in agony, or slit his throat. Over 85% of players chose to slit his throat.
What is this garbage TellTale? Almost everything in the first season felt at least vaguely contextual, everything was based around the characters first. Either we cared about bad things happening to other people because we felt responsible for it through our own decisions, or just because the game had allowed us to get to know and care about these characters (or at least attempted to ) so we cared when the bad stuff happened to them. This episode is just an onslaught of horrible violence and tragedy, possibly in an immature attempt to "top itself" after the finale of the last season. It's borderline gross, there's a difference between hard hitting drama and emotional manipulation, and this episode is firmly set in the latter. When you're introducing cute dogs for the purpose of forcing the player to murder them in the most horrific way possible you're not earning yourself any gold stars for storytelling.
I know Clementine getting a dog bite is a key plot point for when she meets up with the group later, but I refuse to believe that TellTale didn't just make a list of "Depressing Stuff" which had "murder a dog" near the top of it. What's even the purpose of this needlessly cruel opening? To establish the world is cruel and screwed? About that, I kind of got a good feel for the world being screwed when I played a little game called THE WALKING DEAD: SEASON 1.
The point is; TellTale didn't know how to follow up the drama of the first season with new characters or tough decisions, so instead they chose to bully you. They couldn't reach your heart so they decided to keep slapping you across the chest until it felt like the same thing.
Also of note is the fact that TellTale still haven't ditched all the baggage that comes from their origins in more traditional adventure games, so we still have OBJECT PUZZLES. It wouldn't bother me that much except for the fact that the game also uses this element to distract your brain from situations you're supposed to be paying attention to in this "interactive story".
Okay, so after the dog biting scene Clementine bumps into a gang of people who will be the fresh zombie buffet for season 2. They think Clem's bite is from a walker and don't trust her. They don't want to waste medical supplies on her as if she is bitten by a walker she's a goner anyway, so they decide to not treat her immediately and to lock her in a shed until morning. If she's still alive, then they can deduce she wasn't lying about her wound being from a dog bite.
You regain full control of Clementine inside the shed. There's a hammer on top of some shelves that she can't reach, if you attempt to grab the hammer an animation plays of Clementine failing to reach the hammer. The player instantly knows now, even if he/she can't explain it, that they need the hammer. By opening up a little desk thing attached to the wall Clementine can step on it and obtain the hammer (not without violently plummeting to the ground and squealing a lot obviously, this is the generation of videogames that firmly believes protagonists aren't likeable if they aren't constantly having the crap kicked out of them). CONGRATULATIONS, you have solved the hammer "puzzle".
Now you have a hammer, it required effort to get the hammer, so obviously there is a use for the hammer. You look for the one object in the room that you can now interact with due to having a hammer. You use it to take some nails out of a board to reveal a hole that Clementine can crawl out through. You are now outside the shed, the top left corner of the screen is now consumed with a hint informing you of your new mandatory objective to find medical supplies.
But hold on, what if I wanted to just wait out the night in the shed? Clementine has lost everything at this point, these new people are her last hope, maybe she shouldn't jeopardise her one chance to earn their trust by breaking into their house and stealing from them? Sure, I guess there's a chance it'll get infected and she won't survive the night, but getting the wound healed and then stranded in the zombie wild alone seems like a must-lose even worse option.
It doesn't matter whether you agree or even care about my personal interpretation of this situation, the point is there is a "choice" or at an argument to had here. You know this occurred to the writers because the group does notice Clem's self-stitched wound (which is another horrific scene) and mentions it, and then forgives her because there wouldn't be any more game left if they didn't. Telltale covered their tracks by stringing you along on a bunch of adventure game objects, followed by giving you a clear non-questionable objective, in an attempt to make you not notice a key plot point/decision, which seems to undermine the whole "interactive story" thing the game's going for. Bottom line; you got manipulated again.
Soon after that the game ends on a token decision between two characters you don't really know that well or care about. One of them was being way too nice for me to not immediately think he was going to die soon (again) so I knew it was coming. I chose to save Nick because Pete was already bitten, so it became less of a moral choice and more a logical choice in terms of "well he's going to die at the start of the next episode any way", which is something else Telltale really needs to think about on their choices for future instalments.
Ultimately, I didn't really care about the choice either way, and after the game made me feel uncomfortable and gross for playing it for an hour, it managed to turn things around and end on a choice that didn't make me feel anything at all. So yea, not a fan of this episode all round, hope it's only uphill from here!
Episode 2 - A HOUSE DIVIDED
Okay this will be briefer since the first episode took a lot out of me; this one's better! The actual story has got going now and the focus is on events that are driven forward by the characters, and it's not just a big pile of murder and horror on top of more murder and horror.
It kind of goes for the same effect the second episode in the first season went for; in that it's a story featuring a lot of quiet nice moments and people getting along, but you already know it's all about to go wrong. The tension builds as you know the implosion is coming but you can't do a dang thing to stop it.
The scene where creepy camp leader man comes round the house and you're given (probably mostly pointless) regular dialogue options is very clever! It's a scene you see a lot of in movies and TV shows and this episode does a decent job of making you feel the panic and desperation a character would be going through in moments like this. This is a prime example of the "illusion of choice" being far more important than having rock solid choices that actually make huge differences.
Generally speaking, and I'm concerned this might be an issue for the entire series, I do get weirded out by the amount of influence Clementine has over the other characters. Okay, she was a much more mild form of emotional manipulation (compared to the first episode) in season one, as she was the cute innocent girl who would give you the sad eyes whenever you made a hard decision. This doesn't really work now she's the protagonist, and a few years older, and stubborn apocalypse-affected adults she barely knows seem to be leaning on her for advice and moral support. One of the characters flat out admits how stupid it is that she's addressing a little girl in reference to her extremely adult problems.
This leads to a bigger but more subtle psychological weirdness that absolutely will hang over the whole game. The Walking Dead is all about extremely difficult decisions, and adult situations, and hardcore violence, but in this season we are playing an eleven year old girl not a flawed backstory-driven adult like last time. I am an adult thinking with my adult brain in the role of an eleven year old. I find sometimes this makes me not think too hard on lots of decisions, often I go for the "polite" non-committal dialogue option because it just makes more sense to me a little girl would talk like that as opposed to getting in peoples faces or lecturing adults on what they should be doing with their lives. But trying to role play the game like that falls apart whenever you're forced to make those potentially life or death decisions later on. I understand why Telltale would want the second season to be about Clementine, but perhaps having a child protagonist was a fundamental mistake.
Overall though, Episode 2 is way better than the first and I don't feel like junk for playing it, or for wanting to play the next one! There's a good villain in place, a nice relationship between Luke and Clementine building, some intrigue with the returning Kenny and some drama with the pregnant lady whose name I've forgotten. Things could genuinely really pick up from here.
Episode 3 - IN HARM'S WAY
Okay, so that thing I was talking about during the last episode about maybe it being a mistake to have a child protagonist for this season, let's go ahead and chance my stance to it definitely being a mistake. There is literally a scene in this episode where a concentration-camp running, enslaving/murdering psychopath goes eye-to-eye with an eleven year old girl and gives her a generic "we're not so different, you and I" speech.
The sad part is there's so much time dedicated to the villain doing cliché villain stuff to make us hate him, and forced as it was I could have got into it before he pulled that nonsense. Again, most of my dialogue options for Clementine are inspired by what I imagine a child would say in these scenarios, so while my version of Clementine isn't perfect she certainly isn't someone mustache twirling zombie-Hitler should be relating to.
Oh, and about the story, it's Toy Story 3. Seriously. No-one got shot in the dick in Toy Story 3 I suppose, but that's essentially what it is.
That's not to suggest they ripped off Toy Story 3, I'm just pointing out that the narrative itself is not particularly interesting or unique, so this episode needed some other stuff to hold it together..and it didn't really have it. There's a lot of dumb sneaking around with Clementine, some Sarah related decisions that lack any real agency and some bonding with the Bonnie character whose motivation to turn on the camp and help the gang escape are about as flimsy as it gets. Two new characters from the camp are introduced into the gang, despite being introduced as a jerk and a weirdo, they seem to pretty much blend right in when talk of "escape" comes up.
I wasn't very interested in what was going on! The game seemed to be attempting to build tension on whether Luke would help the group or not (maybe it would have made more sense to have Nick in this role?) that I just wasn't feeling, maybe it's because Luke's a graduate of the Nathan Drake School of Cool White Dude Character Design and those guys always come through in the end. Aside from that it was a bunch of relatively dull conversations, broken up with contrived sneaking and Clementine getting moved around the camp constantly for no real reason (I really couldn't keep track of how much time was supposed to be passing during this episode) which all climaxes in an escape that seemed far too easy for all of the buildup.
Not a lot of action in this episode either, which is fine, but what little action was there still involved the "mash this button to nearly get eaten by a zombie until a scripted event saves you" thing that TellTale are way too reliant on.
The final "stinger" decision that ends this episode is probably the weakest in the entire series so far. Axe a zombie in the brain who's biting Kenny's lady (who I don't even remotely care about anyway) or chop off her arm. Well considering this episode already featured a friendly guy with one arm who had his life saved by amputation and seemed pretty chill with the concept, and smashing the zombie wouldn't achieve anything at all, it doesn't even really seem like a choice at all (again, over 85% of players chose to cut off the arm). You have to be careful with these games to not confuse your own perspective and world view with criticism of a "lack of choice", but I'm honestly failing to see the logic of the alternative choice here. Maybe you could argue it would make more sense to brain the zombie first and amputate the arm later in a safer scenario, but that's undermined by 1) the way the choice is presented and 2) the end the episode immediately ends afterwards.
It was no-one near as poor as the first episode, but I can't help but feel underwhelmed and a little bored by this episode. This series is getting me a little too accustomed to death, there's a cynicism running underneath it that's making me less engaged. Meet a new friendly character? Ah, they're going to die. Tough decision between two characters? Ah, they're both going to die soon anyway. Snap decision that will dictate the future of the group? Ahhhhhh, what's going to happen if they make it out anyway, they'll just find some other place to get eaten by zombies. The world's already screwed beyond repair, might as well let it happen.
What I just wrote is the worst thing you could make me feel when there's two episodes of this season to go. Unlike the end of the last episode I'm not even sure what direction this story is going in anymore, not because it's a mystery but because I have no understanding of motivation or goals at this point.
Episode 4 - AMID THE RUINS
I joked about it before but Luke really REALLY looks like Nathan Drake, in this episode he even does the Uncharted "I'll boost you up" thing and holds an AK47. It's getting distracting.
Anyway, I have to give this episode credit over the other three so far on the grounds that this was the first episode this season that had frequent tough choices that actually felt like they would impact the story. I was genuinely conflicted about whether to leave Sarah or not the first time (I saved her), and I really didn't know whether to steal the meds from Arvo (I did, and regretted it because cool gal Jane runs off at the end of this and Luke didn't approve). Didn't really care about the choice when it came to trying to save Sarah the second time because at that point the game was making it perfectly clear she was doomed anyway.
That's one of the core issues the TellTale formula has in general. Having choices and being able to affect the story is great, but you've still got create both scenarios depending on what choice the player makes. So either you've got tie it back to the same linear narrative at some point, or you've got to create dozens of different stories (this is impossible, as Heavy Rain found out). So when The Walking Dead offers you an opportunity to get a character horribly murdered, that instantly communicates to you that either 1) they're inconsequential to the story or 2) they will shortly be horribly murdered anyway. That was kind of my problem with Sarah as a character in general, I didn't want to feed her to the wolves but it was perfectly clear she wasn't making it out of this chapter anyway so no point risking making anything else worse. If anything I regret saving her the first time now.
Also in retrospect I understand the ending of Episode 3 (which now in terms of the overarching narrative feels like the barely canonical episode of Misfits where modern day Britain is controlled by the Nazis) even less; as I chose to cut off Sarita's arm the episode starts with her bleeding out and dying soon after. Maybe Sarita dying/doing whatever she does on the other choice would have worked better on the end of the last episode to actually make me feel like my decision meant anything.
I am enjoying what they're doing with Kenny though, I'm feeling real tension to when or if he's going to freak out. I honestly was semi-braced for him to attack Clementine, and I was genuinely thinking he was going to run away with Rebecca's baby and that was going to be the cliffhanger heading into the finale. It's nice to have one interesting element in the core of this stuff that I'm not certain about, everyone else in this game seems to be a drooling moron who relies on the advice/actions of an eleven year old girl to bail them out.
Seriously, in this episode during my playthrough, Clementine chooses the life-or-death fate of two people, consoles a grieving soon to be mother, kicks down a door, shoots four zombies in the face, robs a guy of his medication and shoots two of her recently turned friends in the face, one of which was trying to eat a baby. I get she's been through some stuff in her time, but wow is it hard to take her seriously as a child protagonist, or at least the world where she would have so much influence. Honestly, from the amount of dialogue options in this game that are "Are you okay?" they could have just replaced her with Terry Bogard.
Oh god that would have been so much cooler.
EPISODE 5 - NO GOING BACK
One of the reasons I didn't comment on the cliffhanger of episode 4 is because I genuinely thought they were going to cop out and reveal the Russian/whatever guys were actually shooting walkers or something. This episode actually starts off with a shootout scene, so good job on that.
Also, the anticipated Lee cameo was handled in a classy and intelligent way, I was half expecting a scene where a conflicted Clementine stumbled across zombie Walker-Lee and was forced to shoot him. I guess that wouldn't have made sense for some people's endings to the first season, maybe they would have tried that if it had.
This is probably the best episode in the season, although that merely comes out as an expression of how inferior this season was compared to the first one. The character development seems more natural here compared to past episodes which contrived separations and situations to get characters to talk about stuff, here there's a nice scene of all the alive characters just sitting around a fireplace getting to know each other more. I also appreciate that this episode plays out depending on your own interpretation of who Clementine is as a character, giving you options for letting her drink and smoke, as well as letting her some to her own conclusions about the world based on everything she's experienced and been taught.
The main difference between this finale and Season 1's is there's five genuinely very different endings depending your final decisions, as opposed to one basically similar ending that you can get to in multiple ways from last time. I ended up with Jane and the family, deciding that it was time for Kenny to get put out of his misery and that Clementine would continue to find support through other people.
I'm finding it very hard to talk about this episode; I'm stuck in this bind where I acknowledge there was some clever decisions to be made in it, but despite decent writing and competent game design I'm finding myself uninvested in it. Perhaps we should discuss this further in an overall wrap up segment...
FINAL THOUGHTS
Now that it's all said and done, I can say with 100% certainty that I think it was a mistake to go with Clementine as the main protagonist for this season.
Maybe not a fundamental error, but the game/story that they wrote makes sense for a generic adult character not a child one. There's some mild whispers of approaching this how a child would react and adapt to this world in places, especially the fifth episode, but whispers is all they are. If anything, a lot of this game's drama is actually undermined by how difficult it is to take Clementine seriously in terms of how capable she is and how the stubborn adults around her talk to her.
The first season worked because Lee was a regular generally well intentioned dude with just enough of a dark past to make it believable for him to make tough decisions, and Clementine was the innocent child thrown into this mess, there to give you the puppy dog eyes when you did bad stuff (whether it was right or not) to make you constantly question yourself. In the second season, Clementine is merely a child avatar for an adult mind, she's not conflicted she's a contradiction. The biggest failure of this season is it completely fails to be about a child.
I'm not really a "fan" of zombie fiction in general, and my frustrations with the genre are really starting to sink in now. The Walking Dead especially is far too hopeless, everyone is already infected, the world cannot possibly come back, humanity cannot continue. The Last Of Us, for all its faults, at least shows a world where some infrastructure remains, and there is a tiny tiny bit of hope that some resemblance of civilisation could return if a cure could be made. That alone is enough to give some motivation or at least feel like something could be achieved if I stay invested.
I don't know what possibly could be achieved in The Walking Dead, there's been dozens of characters introduced across the two seasons, and all but two of them are dead now. Zombie fiction gets around this by making the drama focus solely on the characters and not the world, but I'm afraid that The Walking Dead has revealed his hand too often now. They've brutally murdered so many people now that's there's a filter on my brain, I know everyone has a short shelf life. Maybe the writing in Season 2 was as good or better than the first, but it had far less affect on me this time around. Too much death, too many decisions leading to death, not enough nice moments (like Carly failing to check the batteries on the radio) to get to know these new people.
And where were the really clever non-binary "no right answer" bits from last time? Such as the part in the second episode where you had to give four bits of food to ten starving people? Or what about the parts where Larry gets his head destroyed by a cinder block out of nowhere? Or the part where Lilly wastes a character on the side of the road just after you think you've got things calmed down? Not even the ending trick of recapping and judging you for past decisions is in here, it's just people you barely care about getting murdered one by one...then you pick an ending. It's not incompetently done or anything, and compared to the writing standards of most non-Telltale videogames this is still orbiting around the 3rd floor of heaven, but almost none of it is sticking with me this time.
Ultimately, I'm disappointed in The Walking Dead Season 2, it has its moments but absolutely nothing that hits the peaks of the 2nd, 3rd or 5th episode from Season 1. Honestly, considering how trashy and bad the first episode is I would recommend to people who haven't played it to not bother if they don't want to deal with dog murder right now, there's absolutely nothing that's "must experience" here. A lot of "pretty good" stuff sure, but it's mostly the "pretty good" stuff you were expecting and little else.
People have told me The Wolf Among Us is better...I'll guess we'll have to wait and see...
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