But worry not, because within an hour or so, yup, they escape their chronological shackles of being stuck with a teenage Clem by using flashbacks, and you’re once again watching young Clementine suffer. That promise was immediately unmet when it instantly plunged off a cliff into a mud-pool of cliche, with whingy teenagers “your not my real mum and dad”ing their way through the apocalypse, before parachuting in our young friend in the opening minutes. Finally we could perhaps see a different perspective, find some new stories. So when Season 3 started off with a different cast, Clementine only mentioned in reference to how your S2 save finished (for me on her own with AJ), I was relieved. Only because the games were so boring, uninvolved and repetitive did I struggle to find the energy to care, but on some barely-interested level I worried about the minds that felt the need to just keep repeating the same theme. But after ten episodes of farcical cruelty it just became revolting. Again, it’s the impression that this of itself is believed to be a bold or interesting narrative statement that grates so hard, where we’re supposed to be emotionally bowled over by their courageous portrayal of a child’s suffering.
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Where the series leaves me behind is in this genuinely fetishistic obsession with having you watch Clementine watch utter horror. At this point it would be a shocking surprise twist if they didn’t murder a main character while she stared. I empathise with her character's plight not at the hands of the zombies, but at the hands of the writers.
She’s nothing, she’s an empty shell for the player to watch get tortured, and then have her say, “But I’m a little girl” for the 900th time. And Clementine’s character advances not a jot. It’s literally the only thing that ever happens in any of the games, from the micro level of every tiny action inevitably ending in her falling over, to the macro level of absolutely everyone she knows fighting and dying.
“Look, she’s suffering so much! You think it’s going to get better, but no, it’s going to get worse!” No, we know it’s going to get worse. Oh good GRIEF is The Walking Dead video game trapped in that dreary mire.įor two seasons they’ve had no story to tell other than, “Clementine goes through unimaginable shit on a daily basis, and everyone around gruesomely dies in front of her.” The tragedy being there seems to be the belief that this in itself is interesting or novel. No one has the courage/imagination to do anything interesting with the theme (I think 2006’s okay-ish Fido was the last time anyone even tried), instead inevitably resorting to the same hoary old tropes of “band of people where one’s a wrong-un, one is secretly bit!”.
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Even the most patient of diehards are giving up on the ridiculous TV interpretation of the source comic, and it seems the last drips of potential have been wrung dry from the entire genre, with only outliers like Zombieland managing to find something of a fun last gasp. Zombie stories are obviously woefully played out, and The Walking Dead offers the least imaginative portrayal of the form. Which is, if anything, a generous summation of one of the dreariest, least involved, interminably slow and hackneyed games I’ve ever struggled through. I think I can summarise the previous runs with the phrase, “Little girl torture simulator”. Your feelings about the previous two seasons of The Walking Dead video game may be different than mine, and I suspect you can discern the usefulness of my review of the first two episodes of the third season by how far apart we are. But no, after an hour of sitting on their hands, frantically wriggling as they tried to tell half a story about some ragtag adults and teenagers, they couldn’t resist it, they couldn’t help themselves, and with a near-audible gasp resorted to using flashbacks to be to deliver their fucked up kicks of watching a child suffer. My assumption was, after a couple of years away from the series, Telltale would have regrouped and come to their title afresh with hopes of finding new ground in old territory. Season 2 was so dreadful that I had to play through it this week because we genuinely couldn’t find anyone else who had bothered, in order to review the new episodes, and almost exclusively featured it. Season 1 of their interpretation of The Walking Dead won a lot of acclaim, despite being ultimately an empty and agonisingly slow experience, and was rife with it.
Here's wot I think:įor a moment it really seemed like Telltale were over their fetish. Telltale's The Walking Dead comes back into our lives after just over two years away, but is it a welcome return with fresh water and bandages, or a shambling wreck of fetid corpse.