Game Review: The Walking Dead - Season 2

Off the back of its final episode, Season 1 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead game shot the developer into the stratosphere.  With numerous units sold, massive critical praise and a ton of winning nominations during award season, there was rightfully so much hype and expectation going into the continuation of Clementine’s story.  I make this point because I do wonder if the phenomenal success of the first season served to detriment the perspective people shared on the second season as a result. I think when you strike gold on your first swing, that fear and anticipation to do so a second time can actually cause you to lose a bit of that momentum, something which I feel summarizes Season 2 of The Walking Dead considerably.

Developed and self-published by Telltale Games, the second season of The Walking Dead game was deployed across five episodic releases from December 2013 to August 2014. Its gameplay is presented through the point and click format with dialogue and key decisions mapped to the controller layout.  With Lee Everett sadly no longer in the picture, Telltale pivoted the narrative of the second season to focus primarily on Clementine in the starring role as the player character this time around.  Each episode generated a fairly modest reception critically, though it did end up scoring lower than the original season on average. Commercially there’s not much for me to note as I couldn’t really find anything online regarding how much the second series sold all together.

Set sixteen months after the concluding events of Season 1, Clementine is now 11-years old and surviving initially alongside Christa. Tragedy soon strikes however when the pair get separated during a raider attack and Clementine ends up on her own for a brief period.  After a near fateful encounter Clementine soon comes across and joins a new group of survivors who are on the run from the leader of a prior group they ran away from.  Joining them as they trek further north to escape his pursuit, Clementine will have to face many deadly situations on her own now she no longer has Lee to protect her.  With the colder days drawing close, Clementine must try to keep everyone alive as the dangers become more and more prevalent and she struggles to define friend from foe.

I think shifting the focus of the narrative primarily onto Clementine was the right call when you consider how much the general audience grew attached to her during the course of Season 1. I think the idea of shifting the dynamic around too so that she’s having to face situations on her own now without the aid of Lee also has merit.  The narrative does succeed on that objective of defining Clementine’s independence as the world around her becomes more and more volatile. While it does succeed in a general sense, it’s hard not to feel the tightness and consistency of Season 1’s writing somewhat lacking in Season 2.  The structure of each episode leads into one another fair enough, but between it’s encounter setups and the supporting cast of characters, you can never escape the feeling that the narrative focus teeters up and down throughout each episode.

My biggest gripe with the narrative is the characters in themselves. I just feel like the entire cast of this game is way too bloated for its own good.  Season 1 starts out initially with a large cast too, but you felt their individuality was made clear without compromising the course of the narrative. Season 2 doesn’t have that strength, the cast list is so stacked through each episode that there’s never truly enough time to flesh the majority of these characters out.  It only serves to outline the shallow definition of a lot of these people and in turn make your desire to keep them safe less relevant as it was in the original season. Not all characters suffer from this sporadic focus though, I feel what characters do get given a decent portion of development are relatable and their presence in the story has weight, it’s just a shame it’s not a shared quality across the board.

In terms of gameplay, the general approach is much the same.  You’ll have a selection of explorable segments mixed in with action set-pieces in which you’ll be able to pick and choose how to interact with things.  It’s a gameplay style which I think helps the setting of this game somewhat as you get to soak in some beautifully constructed post-society environments and explore them to your hearts content.  As for the action set-pieces, things are a slight bit more engaging this time, as you’ll have direction inputs to utilize when avoiding dangerous situations. You’ll also get to attack or engage with items more quickly with a nice right trigger prompt.  It’s not revolutionary in any sense, but I imagine Telltale knew there wasn’t much need to shift the course of the gameplay up too much.

Another thing the game does also come up short in comparison to the original season as well is through its choice-based gameplay.  It’s always been one of the biggest tag-lines for these games, the fact that your choices have considerable impact on the course of the narrative but sadly that illusion is not very well hidden in Season 2’s case.  Not many of the primary choices and dialogue throughout the 5-episode structure ever feel like they pan out to have a considerable impact.  Decisions you make ultimately mean very little by the following episode in retrospect.  Season 1 handled this kind of gameplay a lot better because it felt like more effort went into showcasing how relationships can truly change depending on your dialogue and decisions.  The idea of that gameplay is present in Season 2, but its impact leaves a lot to be desired.

One thing the game does better than Season 1 in my opinion is presentation.  Visually they really go all out on the art style for this season with its approach to blending colour with the game’s bleak overall tone.  The environments feel a lot richer in scope and detail too and character models have a lot more variation and definition. Even the score and soundtrack for Season 2 feels like a step up, as the game utilizes a strong selection of music from                Jared Emerson-Johnson and supporting band Anadel. It all meshes nicely to help give Season 2 a very timeless aura that stops it from feeling as dated as other games of the time.

On the whole Season 2 of The Walking Dead does achieve its objective of putting Clementine on the forefront of it’s focus and in turn giving her more definition as a result.  While I feel the quality of its writing is not nearly as consistent as the prior season, nor are its choices as impactful; those issues don’t really do much to devalue the overall product in itself.  Season 2 for all its fault still holds a solid emotional core to experience and if you can find it in your heart to forgive it’s shortfalls, you will see that there’s a decent game here waiting to be played.