What
better way to pass the mid-season tv hiatus
than to see what Clementine is up to.
(Speaking
of the tv series, shouldn’t they have shot
Negan the first time he showed up at the gates
of Alexandria?)
Back to
Clementine.
I left her
in Season 2, by herself save for one other,
but it is a while before I see her again.
After a flashback, this episode lobs us into a
new group - Javier, his sister-in-law Kate and
her two step children. Like everyone else,
they are trying to get by.
Like
everyone else, it never works out as you would
have liked.
A junkyard
offers some promising scavenging, then an
inevitable confrontation. Where we go next you
can discover for yourself. Where we end was a
surprise, but not really given the world we
are in. Some stuff is inevitable, whether you
see it coming or not.
Javier is
the playable character here, save for a
Clementine flashback. No longer a girl, it
suggests we will find out a lot more about how
she has become the young woman we now have,
and what has happened in between. Based on the
choices I made earlier, I can’t say I am
surprised about the former, and look forward
to the latter.
We know
not very much about Javier but no doubt will
learn as we go. At this stage I reserve
judgement, although I am leaning towards being
positively disposed. That might depend on the
choices I make.
So far,
all but one of my choices is in the minority,
so that already promises some interesting
replay prospects.
Two
episodes were released at once, but I intend
to now wait and play all episodes back to
back. It plays and looks like all the other
Walking Dead episodes, but was less frenetic
on the action sequences. It clocked in at 80
minutes and finished on a largish choice, and
while there was nothing new here, that isn’t
in itself a bad thing.
The
Walking Dead: A new Frontier – Episodes 2
and 3
I said at
the end of Episode 1 that I was going to wait
until all 5 episodes were available and play
the lot, but then the TV series ended and I
was left suffering withdrawals so I had to get
stuck back in.
Telltale
released the first two episodes at once, and
they were really two halves of one episode.
Which is not to say that episode 3 doesn’t
follow on, but rather that there is little
reason to stop, as I did, at the end of
episode 1. Which now sounds way too
convoluted, so let’s move on.
We left
off with a confrontation that didn’t go well,
and we leave episode 3 with gunshots in the
dark that could result in anything. In
between, I have come to give a damn about
Javier, and not because some of my choices
have cast him in a less than generous light.
Javier
remains the point from which the primary
storyline is observed, but there are
flashbacks about what happened to Clementine
before she found this new group. There is a
convergence of those events that you may or
may not see coming. The end of the second
episode, which is excellent, I didn’t foresee.
Clementine
has shed any trappings of being a little girl.
She reminds me of Maggie in the tv series, and
is more likely to precipitate events than
watch them occur. We know her well, much
better than Javier and the others, so I wasn’t
surprised she assumed a central place in the
group, but I was a little surprised that
others went along with it. Ditto Javier, who
assumes a leadership position that on its face
is inconsistent with what people know about
him, especially compared to their familiarity
with others in their group. But perhaps that
is what leadership does – it cuts through, and
is apparent regardless of other things. That
is, we know it when we see it, and are
prepared to follow.
The
emphasis on “family” (in the broader sense of
the word) is pronounced in this season, and
offers some interesting choices. There were
also some stark choices which suggest some
excellent replay value – “open fire” as
opposed to “submit”. I won’t really know until
I try, but given the outcome from the former,
I anticipate a few more characters being alive
from the latter.
There are
many parallels with things going on in the tv
series, including a story arc harking back to
the very earliest episodes. I thought that was
a strength of the Game of Thrones series, and
am enjoying it here.
The
actiony bits remain, none terribly hard, and
if you die just try again. There were
occasional bits where you had to walk forward
for no other reason than to give you something
to do (as opposed to just watching), and given
the number of conversation choices I would
have been happy just to watch. I felt I was
indeed contributing to the events, without
having artificially to do so.
At this
stage, I am probably enjoying this one more
than the previous series, and am looking
forward to the last two episodes.
The
Walking Dead: A new Frontier –
Episodes 4 and 5
As usual, I
went back to the first three chapters and
played it as a job lot to get to the end.
Having done so, I was a little surprised.
I ended up feeling that it didn’t hang
together as well as I had thought it was when
played in pieces. Why it felt that way (then
as opposed to now) I don’t know; I would
probably expect the opposite.
In some ways it involved Clementine, perhaps
overly influenced by the end. Her story will
continue, say the words on the screen as she
walks away. Which emphasised the extent to
which her place in this series ultimately felt
a little contrived, like a detour. It wouldn’t
be this series if there wasn’t Clementine, so
she takes us somewhere, involves us in what
this series is really about, then continues on
her way.
I think that became most evident to me in a
scene involving the tried and true method of
walking undisturbed through a herd of walkers.
Clementine was the mechanism by which Javier
knew what to do and then did what had to be
done. My earlier surprise at the leadership
role she was able to assume became less
surprising if she was seen not so much as a
leader but as the orchestrator. Everyone else
is providing the real colour and movement; she
is there to steer it around.
Which didn’t make it unenjoyable, just
different to how it had seemed.
The family aspects remain, with all their
foibles and complications, and there are some
interesting choices to be made. It got a
little clichéd at times, but that might have
been a result of my choices. The gamut of
human emotions is played out, many not so
good, and as always you don’t get to the end
with everyone intact, physically or mentally.
Some are better people because of the
experience, or at least they tell themselves
that.
The action sequences seemed tame compared to
other series, especially towards the end. I
can recall aiming in the past to deal with a
group of walkers; here it is simply hit the q
key in time. The back end again changed my
feelings somewhat; the game was giving me
something to do because it had to, rather than
because it was actively involving me. I
finished thinking I would almost have been
just as happy with the conversations, leaving
everything else to the game.
It took about 8 hours in one go, and I did
enjoy it. Just not perhaps as much as I had
thought I was.
I played
on:
OS:
Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor:
Intel i7-6700 4GHz
