The Walking Dead:
Time to Beat: 8 Hours
Back in 2012, Telltale Games
reinvigorated the Adventure genre and created a fan favorite with The
Walking Dead video game. Based on the popular TV show, it won
praise from even the toughest critics, like The Escapist's Zero
Punctuation and Shamus
Young.
I played The Walking Dead: Season
One near release, and thought it fantastic. But the sequel,
released a year later, didn't meet my expectations, and I forgot
about the series entirely. When Telltale Games collapsed in 2018,
and the series was removed from Steam (to the Epic Games Store), I
assumed I would never finish it. Then Epic Games, in May of 2019,
took ten dollars off of each game over fifteen, and I purchased The
Walking Dead: A New Frontier and The Walking Dead: The Final
Season for five dollars apiece. Finally, I would witness the
conclusion of Clementine's story. With this finished, Awkward
Mixture will review the third and fourth (and final) Walking Dead
games over the next three weeks. This first article will focus on
the third game, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, but with
comparisons to both Season One and The Final Season.
I'd already downloaded the Epic Store
when I tried Fortnite with my brother, but The Walking Dead
was the first purchase I made at the store. The purchase went well,
but downloading the game was another story. On Steam, downloading a
15 gigabyte game requires four minutes. On the Epic Store, The
Walking Dead needed ten. That might not seem significant, only
six minutes, but it means a game from the Epic Store needs twice as
long to download as a similar sized game on Steam. Epic comes with
other issues: a small catalog, an inefficient library organization,
and the fact that it's not Steam (where most gamers already own a
collection of games). It also doesn't include a button to take
screen shots while playing. If there were other problems I didn't
encounter them while installing or playing A New Frontier.
I've played the Walking Dead
franchise across three platforms. Season One is on my Steam
account, but for some inexplicable reason my copy of Season Two
is on Telltale's website. Considering Telltale's bankruptcy, I'm
astonished I can still access the file, though the company
has risen like a phoenix from the ashes. With
six years since I played Season Two, I couldn't locate the
save file and started Season 3 from scratch. In this
situation, A New Frontier asks the player a series of
questions related to Seasons One and Two, along with a
few about Clementine's personality. I tried to recreate my choices
from Seasons One and Two,
but the process wasn't as satisfying as loading a save file from the
previous game.
This
review will attempt to avoid spoiling the A New Frontier
(and all the other Walking Dead games) as much as possible,
but broad plot details and insignificant aspects are necessary for
explaining the game.
The story began when the new
protagonist, Javier (nicknamed Javi) returned home for a family
emergency. The opening scene introduced the main cast: his brother
David, his sister-in-law Kate, and their children, Gabe and Mariana.
The zombie apocalypse hadn't begun yet, but was introduced with a
unique flourish. After this opening, A New Frontier skipped
forward four years, which, according to the Walking Dead Fandom Wiki
is two years after the end of the Walking Dead: Season Two.
Clementine, the companion of Season One and protagonist of
Season Two, didn't appear right away. In fact, she didn't
appear until near the end of the first episode.
The Walking Dead One and Two
were about Clementine, and to a lesser extent, Lee, but Season
Three barely recognized Clementine at all. It might as well be a
separate game, like Fear the Walking Dead is only tangentially
connected to the main Walking Dead TV series. A New Frontier
was like if the third episode of Star Wars introduced a new character
as the protagonist, and Anakin only appeared for twenty minutes.
For the purpose of Clementine's story, the player should take a
machete to Season Three, and ignore it completely. Almost
none of the choices made in Season Three impact Season
Four. Clementine never mentions any of the main characters or
events of A New Frontier in The Final Season. The only
object that connects Season Two, Season Three and
Season Four is Clementine's adoptive son, AJ. In Season
Two Clem took the baby when his mother died. During A New
Frontier the player learned about AJ's fate through a series of
flashbacks. Clementine joined a group, but they kicked her out, and
forced her to abandon AJ. Clem spent A New Frontier
attempting to locate him. The story of Clementine and AJ's
separation conflicted with Javi's story, because they share no
connection. Not only was the Clementine story unnecessary, because
these details could have been included in Season Four,
Clementine didn't act like herself. The writer's transformed her
from a caring, empathetic girl, into a cold, cynical, paranoid jerk.
She lost her heart, but fortunately, she regains her composure for
The Final Season.
Including Clementine as a non-player
character altered how the player approached choices. Very few of the
choices, and their outcomes, have the heft of The Walking Dead:
Season One, especially since none of them are referred to in the
Final Season. Because the player has influenced the character
of Clementine over two games the player was likely to take her side
in disputes. This effect was doubled by the arrival of Paul
Rovia (better known as Jesus). A popular character from the comics
and TV show, his cameo further encouraged players who knew about him
to trust his opinion. These characters, because the player knows
they are trustworthy and level headed, skews their decisions.
The
player initially meets Clementine because of a confrontation with a
gang. Forced to lead the enemy away from his sister-in-law, niece,
and nephew, Javi runs into Clem, and convinces her to help him find
them. Loss is a part of the Walking
Dead video game series,
even more than the TV show. But in a good story, death can't be
inflicted recklessly. Season
One used every death
judiciously. Every demise was used to communicate a broader point
about the character's situation, to teach the player another piece of
vital information, or to force the player to make a difficult choice
(often between two characters). The policeman, the choice between
Shawn and Duck, the girl in the apartments, and the choice between
Carly and Doug all occurred in the first episode of Season One. Not
one of these was wasted on shock value. The only major death in the
first episode of A New
Frontier was disgusting
in its determination to shock the player. It was so ineffectual,
that though the character should remain on the characters' (and the
player's) mind, she was only mentioned once or twice in the remaining
four episodes. The character's death creates no emotional resonance.
Most
of the emotional depth of A
New Frontier resided in
the main character, who was well developed and earned the player's
empathy. Like Lee from
Season One he suffered
through his own fault, and seeks redemption. During the apocalypse
Javi was tasked with caring for children who are not his, and
receives little support, except from their mother, Kate. But unlike
Lee, he meets some serious lunatics. The principal ass was his
brother David. David fails to take responsibility for any of his
actions. As a man with power and authority, won't take
responsibility for the actions of his underlings either. He blamed
Javi for murders committed by his own people, and constantly caused
more chaos and death by his decisions. He never tried to deescalate
situations, and always choose to meet force with force. He's abusive
and controlled by his anger, assuming he was better than anyone else.
Even his periods of regret were brief, mostly focusing on his own
pain, than any he has inflicted on others. David never helped
anyone, and yet the game explicitly insisted the player to support
him, while his actions demonstrated he was a selfish, violent,
sociopath. As a former soldier, David misunderstood what his duty
was. He approached every conflict with violence, instead of
searching for a route to peace.
To be fair to David, almost everyone in
Season Three was an ass. None of the male companions are
likable. They were angry, paranoid men with itchy trigger fingers.
This description applied to most of the women as well, including
Clementine. Anyone that believed Kenny was a one-dimensional jerk
after playing Season One will recognize him as a complex
character compared to those of A New Frontier. No one in
Season Three had the intensity of Kenny, or has suffered his
agony. The worst were two companions Javi met in Prescott. (Side
note, a vibrant, walled community built in the ruins of an airfield,
containing at least a few dozen people, is somehow destroyed by eight
zombies, and four invaders?) These two followed the protagonist and
his family to the New Frontier. At the settlement, Javi and company
were asked to wait in a holding facility, but the Prescott people
proceeded to whine and complain. They don't trust the people here!
Why do they have to suffer this indignity? Then, when it
appeared as if Javi's actions would force them to leave the New
Frontier they turn on him. And when the company was invited back in
they betray Javi, going behind his back to tattle on him to the
leaders. So, the people who didn't want to be in the New Frontier,
became upset when Javi almost got them kicked out, and then they
blamed him, and stabbed him in the back. They remained pointlessly
argumentative, willing to always embrace the opposite side, even if
Javi was agreeing with something they said two minutes earlier.
They, along with a number of other characters were incredibly
temperamental, if not psychotic.
A New Frontier included a few
nice characters (all female), such as David's lieutenant Ava. Javi's
sister-in-law and traveling companion, Kate, was also fairly well
written. The only problem was that the developer seemed intent on
forcing a narrative onto their relationship. The game offered
numerous opportunities for the player, as Javi, to express his love
for Kate. She attempted to entice him into a relationship, which
wasn't unreasonable, because they believed her husband (Javi's
brother), David, was dead. But when she learns he was alive, she
continued to express her desire for Javi, saying she would leave
David (a good choice, see above). But no matter how much the player
as Javi expressed his unwillingness to commit to a relationship,
everyone they meet assumed Javi was Kate's husband, or was at least
sleeping with her. This lead to one of the worst choices of the
game. The Walking Dead games often asked the player to make
tough binary choices, but Season Three forced a bad one on the
player. When Kate asked if Javi loved her, there are only two
choices: yes or no. Considering the circumstances, there needed to
be more nuance between these two options.
Before concluding, I want to mention a
further bunch of flaws with The Walking Dead: A New Frontier.
I don't remember everything about
Season One and Two, but the visual effects of Season
Three look somewhere between off-putting and terrible. The
background grated against the characters, whose eyes and teeth were
bad, but not as bad as the atrocious appearance of hair (especially
beards) and necklaces. Season Three must look worse than One
and Two, though I can't imagine why it would if they were
using the same engine.
For some reason there was no controller
support for Season Three, even though there was for One,
Two, and Four. It's probably because the gameplay
(which has always been a small part of the series) was worse than
normal. A New Frontier included more quick time events (as a
percentage of the action) and fewer good action scenes. The sneak
scenes, of which there were a few in Season One and Two,
were much more common, and much worse in Season Three. A Sneak scene
narrows the perspective of the main character, and forced the player
to walk slowly forward. Done well they build tension in a risky
situation, but done poorly they highlight the lack of danger.
In conclusion, The Walking Dead: A
New Frontier seems like an entirely different studio compiled it,
after reading the notes about The
Walking Dead: Season One and Two.
The visual effects have either degraded, or were never as good as I
thought they were. The characters, aside from a strong showing by
Javi, are despicable, nasty jackasses. The developers even managed
to degrade the hero of the series, and create a story for her that is
completely irrelevant to her story arc. The rest of the story has no
connection to Clem's adventure, and is never mentioned again in The
Final Season. The choices are weak, and the ending, which shows
the final outcome of those choices, is dull. It offers a small
reflective for Clementine, but it isn't substantial enough. The best
part of the game, aside from Javi, may be the epilogue, which details
the player's choices and their outcomes.
Next week, Awkward Mixture reviews The
Walking Dead: The Final Season.
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