By Brad Sewell on December 29, 2013 at 10:00am
Telltale Games resumed its "Walking Dead" series this month with the onset of the second season, this time shifting away from Lee, the protagonist of the first season, to center around young Clementine. After a brief introduction, the plot advances 16 months to show Clementine as she’s separated from the last living person to care for her, leaving her alone to face the stark reality of the zombified, er, walkerfied world. New allies abound, although the favorable ones aren’t as clearly cut as in previous installments.
To say the least, this episode doesn’t pull punches. The opening of Clementine’s story is harrowing on its own, and one particularly gruesome scene later in the episode rivals that of Trevor’s interrogation in “Grand Theft Auto V.” Where Lee’s generosity and steadfastness were often rewarded in kind, Clementine is easily betrayed. Doing the right thing was easy as Lee; all it took was making sure that you took care of the girl, and you could rest easy at night. Clementine doesn’t have anyone to care after any more than she has anyone to care for her. “I’m just a little girl!” she shouts in one scene, but even that has little impact on survivors after a year and a half in hell. Even though Lee was a former university professor, he was still capable in some ways; 10 year-old Clem is not, even to the point of needing to rearrange boxes to fetch a hammer from a high shelf.
“All That Remains” left me with a sense of bitterness by the end of the episode, but in a good way. Maybe Lee would have gotten Clementine out of the situation she found herself in, but Clementine felt so helpless on her own. The other survivors she encountered had some worthwhile members, but those were a woeful minority. Before the episode was over, I wondered more than once if she would be better off in the wilderness again than with the people she found.
Remember in the first season when Carly couldn’t solve the riddle of putting the batteries in the radio? Now imagine she was a doctor. These are the people Clementine met.
Telltale’s voice acting is top-notch, which is -- admirably -- par for the course. Melissa Hutchison (who also acted in Telltale’s “Back to the Future” and as Ashe in “League of Legends”) delivered another heartfelt performance as Clementine, one that showed the growing fear, agony, and desperation in a panicked little girl.
The environments are dismal and beautiful with most of the game taking place on overcast days in North Carolinian forests.
Fellow inverted players will be glad to know that season two does offer an option to invert the Y-axis. This was a major issue for me starting out in the first season and one that was never remedied with what could have been an easy update. Inverted controls were the first thing I looked for when starting “All That Remains,” but the first season seems to have broken something in my brain, and I quickly had to pause to reset to default controls. I can still play with default controls (until I’m told to aim a gun for some reason), but I’ll always feel like that Y-axis inversion was the kind of thing that should have been offered earlier. Still, I appreciate the inclusion this time around, even if it was a bit late for this particular gamer.
Season two’s user interface felt like a step backward from the first season’s. In season one, you could select your speech and action options with either the action buttons or the directional pad (playing on PS3 here); season two only works with the action buttons. This is in no way gamebreaking, but moving the reticule with the right thumbstick and choosing options with your right thumb as well made it harder to interact with things on the fly. On the other hand, it felt like the game gives more time for speech options this time around, and the “Mash X a jillion times!” instances are less irritating (and the times this happened in the first season were still nothing compared to examples littered throughout "Metal Gear Solid").
In a time where it often feels like developers are losing their grips on what makes a good story, Telltale clinches it again with another emotional narrative. A House Divided is set to release in the first part of 2014, and I can hardly wait.
