Why I Stopped Caring about Telltale’s The Walking Dead

The Clementine-focused Walking Dead titles that we have gotten from Telltale have all had the benefit of time. Season 1, Season 2 and A New Frontier have been releasing regularly since 2012, and they have all followed, to greater and lesser degrees, the child Clementine from childhood to adolescence. Typical of the post-apocalyptic zombie genre, they’re grim and gritty, asking the player to make hard choices about who lives and dies. There are heroes, bullies, victims, and the damned. At their best, they provide a platform for really thinking through the emotional implications of your actions, and the simple “[character] will remember that” in the upper right corner of the screen that could appear after any given choice is enough to make a player spiral into what-ifs.

If it’s all so great, then why aren’t I excited about the final season appearing? The problem is that the games have no coherent identity to them. The other series that I mentioned above, Modern Warfare and Assassin’s Creed and Dark Souls, all have a consistent tonal identity to them. I know what to expect, and within those expectations, the games allow me to explore them and invest my time into them. But Lee’s adventures with Clementine were hopeful and melancholic at the same time. All the characters were in the process of losing things, and that loss meant something.

As I wrote here at Paste, the second season is so invested in suffering for the sake of suffering and end-of-the-world tropes that it made me think that it might be better for the series to simply stop. It didn’t, of course, and the third season was so tonally off-putting to me that I didn’t even make it through the entire season. What began as an investigation about relationships and hard choices at the end of things turned into gleeful pain and apocalypse tropes, like a mutated DNA strand warped far out of shape in its adaptation of a TV show adapted from a comic adapted from a vast amount of zombie media. There’s no focus other than plot, no moments for quiet thought, no ambiguity about the whole project.

Where other media and other games have shown that you can take an audience’s investment and really spin it into something special and rewarding, everything tells me that the last season of The Walking Dead is going to disappoint. And, look, I’m going to play it because I need to know. There is nothing I want more than to be proven wrong here. But all of that time, all of that thought, that I have put into the series is working against the game. Like Clementine, I had to work my way through all of those choices, all of those tones, and all of those disappointments. The game’s final season is meant to be a capstone, a send off to this universe six years in the making, and I hope it’s an excellent one. But I’m worried that it’s going to make me yearn for a world that could have been, and that’s never where you want an audience to be.