Generally, the game rewinds to moments before the failed reaction test, providing another opportunity to pass. However, death, although shocking - the death of children, a staple of the comic book and TV treatments of The Walking Dead, is something video games are usually hesitant to portray - is not disabling. Clementine does seem to be preternaturally good at killing zombies, but she is a fast learner in a dangerous world.Īs in the first season of The Walking Dead, action sequences usually resemble QuickTime events - where clicking on a particular spot on the screen to shoot or stab an incoming zombie, or pressing the right direction key to evade one can mean the difference between life and death. Playing as a young girl rather than an adult changes the feel of the game during conversation and also the action sequences, which are more about staying alive than brute force. A recurring dialog option for Clementine is a variation on “I’m just a little girl” - first used to mean “why are you being so mean?”, and later “why are you expecting me to do everything for you people?”. Her frustration at the failure of any of her new group to match Lee for calm, resourcefulness or empathy is also felt by the player, as they increasingly resort to asking her what to do, and then ignore her advice. Driven by a series of poor decisions, Clementine is the most mature character in many situations, despite being the youngest. Primarily it does this by shifting them from hostile to hapless. Immediately suspicious and hostile towards Clementine, the narrative has to work hard to make these survivors people Clementine might actually want to associate with, given the whole “locked in a shed” issue. This causes an immediate problem in The Walking Dead Season 2, because the group Clementine falls in with somewhat resemble the prize table at an idiot raffle. Within the first half hour, she has been aged two years after watching one of her surrogate parents senselessly killed in a prolog, violently sundered from her remaining family, nearly drowned, savaged by a hunger-maddened dog and locked in an rickety shed surrounded with zombies by a chaotic group of survivors. The first episode involved the player taking control of Clementine, the perky eight-year old who provided Lee, the first season’s perspective character, with an emotional focus and a reason to go on. Throughout Season 2 of The Walking Dead, familiar predicaments are deepened. The answer Telltale settled on was to make everything worse. In narrative terms, this leaves plenty of opportunity for a second act - there are still characters alive to act as protagonists and antagonists, the world of the game is largely unchanged on a macro level (no cure for zombies, no extinction of humanity), and we still care about Clementine.
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