The Walking Dead, S2: E1 – F***ing finally!

Normally I work during Monday to Friday from 1:30-10:00 PM. I pretty much just wake up, go to work, come home, play video games until 4:00 AM, go to bed and then repeat. Yes, my social life is clearly as thrilling as you might think. But this past week I had Tuesday and Wednesday off. And like magic on my first day off, the second season of The Walking Dead goes live as soon as I wake up and I go into full throttle Telltale Games fangirl mode.

I texted my editor in full caps, “WALKING DEAD SEASON TWO LIVE ON STEAM. RIGHT NOW.”

And then I went and downloaded it, despite the fact that Christmas is one week away and I have no money at all. But hey, I do what I want, and what I want is to not wait around for a game I’ve been waiting for since I last played the “400 Days” expansion.
Heads up, in advance, this review is going to be a little bit spoilery, due to the length of the first episode of this season. There’s no way around it for me unless all you want to read is, “Clementine is a bit older and she is really cool. Also, there are some other people.”

The game begins with a very pregnant Christa and Omid skipping gleefully toward a gas station, with Clementine ambivalently trailing behind. Omid is insisting that Christa and him named their unborn child “Omid Jr.”, while Christa playfully bickers with him about how confusing it will be if they do. It’s one of those overly saccharine moments where you’re praying for a zombie to pop out and rip someone’s larynx out, but it achieves the intended purpose of reconnecting you emotionally with these three characters.  While Christa enters one bathroom to clean up, Clementine enters the other to wash her face.

Upon dropping your only water bottle to the ground like only an adolescent could, you’re surprised by a young girl who begins looting through your backpack. One thing leads to another and Omid gets shot in the chest, with Christa running in, shooting the looter in the process.

Well, basically, the first episode is pretty much just a crapload of misery. Within fifteen minutes, Clementine makes friends with a curious dog, only to have to either let him die a slow, gruesome death or slice his throat with her pocket knife. Me, playing a twelve-or-thirteen year old girl, has to murder a dog friend. This game just shits all over your emotions and laughs while you muddle through difficult decisions.

One thing I can say for sure is that Clementine is probably the most bad ass character I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. She may be young, but you get to watch as she sterilizes a giant wound on her arm and stitches it back together with a sewing needle and fishing wire; you watch as Clementine single-handedly protects herself from gruesome zombies. Somehow, despite everything that happened in the last game, she is the sole survivor of her troupe. Everyone else is dead as shit (from what we know) or absolutely beyond emotional repair, living off alone in the woods somewhere.

Despite playing the previous game, I had some issues with the controls. I was trying to get Clementine to light a campfire with a stupid drawing Duck drew but it wasn’t letting me pursue the action. I actually menu’d out four times to look at the very easy-to-understand controls, wondering whether or not I was a complete idiot or if my keyboard straight up wasn’t working. Like the last game, I found some of the camera angles a little awkward and… old school survivor horror? If you played Silent Hill 2 when it first came out on the PS2, you’ll know what I’m talking about; those weird ankle-level shots that make it hard to navigate your character around in the environment.

As an interactive-story-slash-adventure-slash-visual-novel fan, what I loved best about my first playthrough of this season’s episode was Clementine’s character progression. They don’t age her dramatically, but little things about how she speaks, her responses, her reactions and her body movements convey that she’s older now than she was with Lee. She’s changed, and maybe not for the best, but it’s allowed her to survive this far. Telltale does such an amazing job of writing a “little girl” character with integrity, perseverance and cunning, that I began to reevaluate other adolescent characters from recent games in a negative light. Unlike Ellie in “The Last of Us”, Clementine isn’t used as a plot device. She’s not there to further the story of some bearded, angsty dude; Clementine’s story is the only story that matters. The game is about her and her memories, her experiences and her choices.

Despite the gore, if I had a twelve-year-old daughter, you bet your ass I’d be putting this game under the Christmas tree this year. I think if a young female video game fan can handle the violence, they should absolutely be playing games like The Walking Dead. This game speaks to me more about female empowerment than anything I’ve seen in this past year. Congrats, Telltale Games, for you’ve melted my cold, black heart and have given me hope for the future of female characters in survival horror genres.