*Minor Spoilers*

Back in 2012, Telltale games released the first episode of a game that would change them, as well as some gamers, forever. When the first episode of The Walking Dead came out, I was skeptical. The majority of film or TV tie-ins are terrible. Usually rushed out as shambling corpses that feed upon our cash. I had assumed that this would be the same, considering that, at the time, AMC’s TV show had just started to take flight and become The Heart’s Desire. That was why I was surprised when they announced that it would link with the comic-book universe. As a huge fan of the comics, this sparked my interest.
I didn’t know what to expect when I purchased it and it begun downloading. I had never played Telltale’s Jurassic Park or Back to the Future, but from what I had heard, they had not been well received. The only game of theirs I had played was one of the CSI games way back when (of which I am not overly proud of) and one of the Sam and Max ones.
The choice to make it episodic was foreign to me. Paying for a small segment of a game, getting into it, only to have to wait a few months before getting to play another three hours of it. Part of me thought about waiting until the entire thing had released before buying it, it seemed like The Best Defence, but I didn’t want to miss out. Also the fact that it was around £3.50 for the first episode meant that if I didn’t like it, I could just not continue buying/playing it.

So when We Find Ourselves playing, I was amazed. It was one of the best stories I had witnessed at the time, and the game was so brilliant done. The idea that your choices affected the game (which you only really got to see after the first episode) was fantastic. It perfectly suited the theme of the game, as you really did feel that your choices moulded the story affecting This Sorrowful Life. And some of them were pretty hard to make; choosing who to give the food to, or picking which one of two survivors to rescue, were hard hitting decisions that you had to make in only a few moments, sometimes without the chance to really weigh up the options. The game always made you feel as if you had made the wrong choice. Rescue Carley; the woman with the only firearm in the group, in the first episode, and in the second she is a liability who really offers no help whatsoever, she was Too Far Gone at this point. Where as if you rescued Doug; who was really a bit of a dweeb, he then stepped-up and offer more help out around the group, but you had lost your only gun at the time.

This was ultimately just a façade. The game really just gave you the illusion of choice. Looking back at it now, and having playing it multiple times since then (as well as all of Telltale’s catalogue therefore after), I can see that it really didn’t matter what choice you made, as you would still end up at the same place in the end. As well as any character you saved, meant that they were still marked for death and Made To Suffer by not surviving to the end of the game. Much like Final Destination, once you saved them, their time was running out, and an uncontrollable event would occur, whereby the character would eventually be killed of, you knew that this would be coming and so it was truly Something To Fear.
But during the course of the game, it didn’t matter. I really felt as if I was honestly making the hard choices that were changing the course of the game. Unless you replay it or read up about it, then you never really knew how it could have played out, and I think that this is the best way to play these games; just one run through that is your own personal journey.
Once you start seeing all the different eventualities, then it begins to water-down the choice as see these games for what they actually are; a series of quick-time events. That is all the gameplay is at the end of the day. At certain moments you press X not to die, or tap A to push away a Walker to avoid it from eating your face, or fighting against other survivors, making us Fear The Hunters that were pursuing us.
These were the moments that actually did make you feel as if you were, sort of, playing a game. This was the thing that put a lot of people of from actually playing it funnily enough. As to them, they just felt as if they were pressing a button from time to time during an interactive story. And to be fair they are not far off. But we are not here to play a proper game, we are here to see something of A Larger World. The moments in The Walking Dead that require you to move the analogue stick and press RT to shoot the dead, were not the most enjoyable. They felt sluggish and clunky. Only a select type of gamers stayed with this for another reason. We are here to get our story on, and so Here We Remain. Season One is one of the greatest stories ever told in video told. The story of Lee and Clem is one that I will also hold dear to my heart until my dying day. I was greatly invested in the story and really did feel as if I was living my Life Among Them as we went on this amazing jounrey. The final episode (while annoyingly shorter than the rest and would then become the box standard of every Telltale game’s episode that were released afterwards) was a truly powerful moment that clutched at your heart throughout. By episode Three there was No Turning Back, and, other than a few hiccups here and there, there was really No Way Out of this obsession I had with seeing where their story would end up. It was magnified by the journey we had taken to get to this moment, and all the hard-hitting moments we had witnessed along the way.

I also enjoyed waiting the Days Gone Bye until the next episode was released. Only this game and the first episode of Season Two, made me highly anticipate the next episode. The prospect of What We Become next time really made me enjoy this episodic style that Telltale had employed. I would replay the previous one and eagerly wait the release date. Telltale were, and still are, terrbile with this. They would announce the episode’s release date a few days, or at most a week, before the release of the episode. While we don’t have to wait so long after the announcement, we have already waited bloody ages in the dark. It was enough to turn your Whispers Into Screams.
Anyway, once the new episode of Season One came out, I would rush home and play it that very night. Baring myself way and playing it in its entirety, being undisturbed from my the next exciting episode as I knew that there was Safety Behind Bars.

It was by no means a perfect game. It had bugs and glitches, at one point jubbing out to the point where everything went insane. Characters talked over one another and strange camera angles appeared (I will try and upload the video on here one day and show you as this happened more than once). The “Previously on The Walking Dead” section was terrible as well. While suppose to show you what had happened in the last episode/s, it was slow and felt as if the game was desperately trying to remember what had happened, much like ourselves since we had just waited months for the new episode.

After that the world of Telltale Games exploded, and it has never really stopped. Since the season finale we have had (and yes I have played them all at this point);

• The Wolf Among Us – which was brilliant, considering I had no idea of the source material. This is easily the second best Telltale Game ever made. It was a strange as during the course of the game, you did not feel as if your choices had as much importance in the world as The Walking Dead. As it was not often a true Life And Death In The Walking Dead, I wanted to make sure everyone in the group was happy so we could work together, but this was often met with clashes and differences of opinions which would ultimately split the group up. In the Wolf Among Us I felt as if I could be a dick to whoever I wanted to. This was brilliantly dealt with in the last episode when all your bad choices came back to haunt you.
• Season Two of The Walking Dead – while continuing Clem’s journey, and having Michael Madsen in, Season Two felt a little lacking compared to the first. There were some good surprises and some hard decisions to be made, but the story never reached the pinnacle that Season One had laid before it. The evolution of Clem was fantastic, and seeing this little girl become a colossal badass was fantastic. The story fizzled after they killed off their main antagonist in episode three (after building him up for so long previously) in a lacking ending remisiant of The Whisperer War from the comics (sorry, that was a hard one to link into this review).
• Minecraft: Story Mode – was an enjoyable journey. Clearly it was easier for Telltale to make as they released eight episodes of this one, and they have just announced the second season. After the first four, the story ended and each episode afterwards was its own separate story, which watered down the fact that your choices carry over from episode to episode.
• Tales from Borderlands – was a strange choice and one that I was interested to see how they could make an arcade FPS into a Telltale game (as it is kind of its own genre now. Not really a point and click adventure, but not really anything else). The first episode of this was amazing. It was funny and the story was really engaging. The episodes after lost their charm and other than a full good moments in the middle of episodes, the overall story felt a little dragged out.
• Game of Thrones – was perfect for this type of game, but having decided to set it in the TV show universe and having actors and actresses reprise their roles, they were limited to what they could do. You could see this throughout. While we enjoyed a lot of the hard decisions we had to make in Westeros, eventually leading to the March To War that the character would eventually face, the over game was lacking in most areas.
• The Walking Dead: Michonne – was interesting as it tied in nicely with where the comics were at right at that point in time. While only being three episodes long (apparently a mini-series) and not relating to the previous seasons, it was just a quick little game to try and help tie us over until Season Three (which I will get to in a minute, I promise). There were a few good moments in this, but the game was really let down by some inconsistencies in The Walking Dead universe (the chained up zombies section with no jaws section) and just knowing that our choices would not matter, as this was its own separate story.
• Batman – was enjoyable. It was yet ANOTHER origin story of most of the Batman characters, and a lot of them were Telltale’s own take on them, but overall I enjoy this. The main story of the game could have been better, but if they made a season two, then I would look quite forward to it. Although not having Kevin Conroy as the voice really did make it feel as if it was lacking and not truly a Batman story.
• Guardians of the Galaxy – is the only one I have yet to play. At this point in time it is only two episodes in, but I think I will wait until the entire lot has been released until I do. Since the prices have gone up to £5.15 an episode, normally you can pick these games up far cheaper once they have been released.

Finally we come to what this review is about; The Walking Dead – Season Three. Since this is not really a game, as by now you can probably guess what the actual gameplay is going to be like. We know what we are going to get; pressing buttons to make choices in conversations, occasionally walking around and picking up objects (which were always the dullest moments of these games), and engaging in action set pieces where we do a little quick-time event in order to survive. This review is mainly going to be about the actual story of the season.

So back in December 2016, Telltale released the first two episodes of Season Three simultaneously. Season Three (or now was it is called “A New Frontier” due to the fact that they clearly didn’t want to discourage new people to series, as nobody wants to jump into anything in its third season) begins with a new character entirely; Javi Garcia. The entire thing was labelled as A New Beginning for both new and returning players.
After an intro where he and his family first encounter a Walker, the story jumps to a few years into the Zombie Apocalypse (pretty much where the comic books are up to), and follows the story of Javi, his brother’s wife (who he is now cracking on with) and his brother’s two kids. You see Javi’s brother went missing in the intro and has been presumed dead ever since, so there is no surprises here as to what is going to happen. Anyway, the miss-matched family are on the road and run into a new group calling themselves The New Frontier, who are your run of the mill Call To Arms apocalyptic raider group we have all come to expect from this type of scenario.

I won’t go into every single scene of the season, but the basic story is that Javi meets up with Clem, who we now view from a third person perspective (in the sense that we do not play as her, similar to Metal Gear Solid 2, in which we meet Snake, but never play as him), and it turns out that she has some past beef with The New Frontier, who is lead by three people, one of whom is Javi’s brother. After some classic Walking Dead moments, the other leaders do not welcome Javi and his group in and this creates some tension between everyone. Chaos erupts, All Out War – Part One takes place and lots of people die, some of whom are related to the choices you have made. It is the standard story that you have come to expect. Which was one of the major issues that I had with this game.
The first two episodes do not really get properly going until the very end when we meet up and discover Javi’s brother. Before then we are just aimlessly wandering the wasteland, meeting up with a few characters who we think might be relevant down the line, but now looking back, they really weren’t, as well as partaking in action set pieces of quick-time events that really not important in the grand scheme of things.
We spend most of the first episode finding petrol for a van, where as in episode two, we are dealing with the consequences of taking the petrol. It is only at the end of episode two that we got to see where this season might be heading, what with the awkward love triangle that has now formed with Javi, his brother and his brother’s missus, as well as the fact that all of his brother’s kids now like Javi more. We also get to see that something sinister is a foot in The New Frontier and if you have read The Walking Dead comics, seen the TV show, or played anything zombie or post apocalypse related, we can see that it won’t be too long before everything has gone up shit’s creek and All Out War – Part Two occurs.

After the duel release of episode one and two, we then had to wait the entire length of two episodes being released normally before we got episode three. We had to wait nearly four months since completing the first two episodes before Telltale announced that episode three was coming next week. By then I had already lost interest and the story was now Miles Behind Us in our minds. The huge haul of Telltale game episodes that I had played since Season One, meant that I could not be bothered to go back and replay the episode previously again. It was no longer this unique game where I was really eager to see the other eventualities. Now I was playing it and keeping that one play-through as my story.
So when episode three came out, I remembered sitting and waiting for the “Previously” section to help me remember what had happened, only to see the ending of episode two being the sole part of it that was important, solidifying the idea that the rest of episode one and two was nothing more than a meander through different random zombie encounters.

It was not to say that the first two episodes were bad. They just never really felt as if they were going anywhere. If felt like The Calm Before the actual storyline kicked in. They had some shocking moments, such as a few key deaths that I did not see coming, as well as some enjoyable action orientated scenes, but we have come to expect that from these games by now, and you need to do something more to push the boat out.

Thankfully episodes four and five came out far sooner after episode three, and it allowed the story to stay fresh in my mind for when I played the next one (which is sort of why I am waiting on Guardians of the Galaxy until the entire thing has been released). The trouble with episodes three and four was that it had a very simple story that they wanted to tell, but they dragged it out. The story is nothing more than the classic tale of a corrupt post apocalyptic town and its eventual fall. Season One did a similar storyline, but actually cut out the build up and we just simply witnessed the aftermath of the fall, so it is not something new we have seen even in The Walking Dead game universe. It is a very ‘safe’ storyline.
While it was good that the story of this season continued throughout, rather than fizzle out at episode three and then just muck around with action set pieces and irrelevant storylines like Season Two, there was still not much to be had here, and what is here is so lightly spread that you can barely taste it.

Episode five did push the boat out. By this point the inevitable fall was imminent and it was the perfect time to have these large action scenes take place. They had done enough build up (maybe even too much) and it was time to kill off the main antagonists and maybe even a few main characters, as well as get the story to its dramatic ending.
While I did enjoy the final episode, I did feel that the ending of the story was pretty dull. When they did kill off a few characters we had known throughout the entire season, they died in some of the dullest ways possible. They even tried to replicate the dramatic ending of Season One, but the character they had chosen to kill off was uninteresting and had been nothing more than a pain in the side. Most of the time we had not even seen or care much for this character, so when they tried to make a huge dramatic death for them, I felt like I wanted to just get back to the main story and carry on.

One thing I will say is that in the middle of the last episode, we are forced to make a choice whether to go after two characters, or go and help out at the town. I decided to go with the town option. Now when we do go and meet up with the other characters, one of them is just lying face down dead. Now this person was a key character throughout the entire season and to kill them off like that just felt like a total waste. Maybe if I had chosen the other option (one that I will pursue once I get the chance), then this character might have had a dramatic death, but killing them this way was a terrible ideal. It was the first time in any Telltale game that I really did feel that I had made the wrong choice.

Another strange thing is that when they released the promotional cover of episode five, we can clearly see one of the characters as a zombie. We instantly knew that their fate was sealed, but it turned out that that character didn’t even die, at least not in my game. Again maybe if I had chosen the other option (which I feel the game really did want me to do and considers it canon) then I would have seen this other character die and reanimate.

The entire season just felt as if it was full of bad design choices. For example, Jesus from the comic books (The Walking Dead comics, not some bible comic) appears in a couple of episodes, but never really serves any greater purpose other than to say “Hey, we link in with the comic books”. Another is the fact that they tried to do something that happened in Season One, when characters decide if they are going to go with you or not, based on the choices you had made during the entire season, but it was not done anywhere near as well. In fact I did not even realise that something like that was even going on until at the end when I was reading my stats, where as in Season One, I clearly knew that my past choices had greatly impacted their decisions to accompany or not (only Ben did if you are interested – Season One).

Another bad decision the writers made was to include back-stories and flashbacks that were inconveniently relevant to what will occur during the events of that particular episode. For example, in the intro of episode five, we get to see Javi’s dad. We have only see this character zombified previously, but we are force-fed this attempted emotional storyline of a promise Javi made to his dad to always love his brother and what not. Now if this had been given to use far earlier in the game, it would have been great to see the big pay off if we decided to finally break that promise (or not), where as we instantly knew that it will be relevant for this episode. Sometimes, and this happens a lot in TV shows, where the writers did not plan ahead and rather than leaving key important scenes, that seem unimportant, they are actually breadcrumbs leading us to an enormous pay-off later down the line. Having a little convenient flashback that throws in a key piece of information later on down the line, just feels a little sloppy.

Choosing to put Clem on the back-burner was also not a great idea. She feels unimportant and we never get to see the character evolve further than what she already was when we first meet her in episode one. Her evolution is the key aspect of this series for long term fans. We have come to see this character grow and grow from being a helpless little girl in a tree house, blossoming into a badass teenage zombie slayer.
In this season she was nothing more than a background character. New people to series will only see Clem as someone standing in the back and not overly engaging in anything. She will be seen in the same light as any of the new and irrelevant characters that feature in this season.

It is not to say that Season Three of The Walking Dead was bad. It was enjoyable. The shift in the main character was not ideal, but we got to see some fresh stories occur because of it. The writers were not limited to Clem’s story I suppose, but truth be told, that was all I wanted.
There were tough decisions to be made, most of which made you feel as if you had made the wrong one (but only in a story aspect, not in a gameplay ruining one like I mentioned earlier), and they really did crank the gore up to eleven. The graphics have gotten better (if only marginally since the original back in 2012), and the variety in zombies was impressive. I never did feel that it was the same Walker we had encountered and killed earlier on (which was always the issue with the original Walking Dead game).

By the end of the Season I felt as if I was glad that it was over. Not necessarily in the bad way, I just felt that Clem’s storyline was hinted at being the key area of focus in the next season, and I am far more interested in seeing where that is going. While the story did have some good, and even some great, moments, it has struggled to live up to the second season of The Walking Dead, let alone the masterpiece that was the first one. Having the basic Telltale game formula is good enough for anyone who are fans of these games, so you will instantly enjoy making hard decisions and effectively role-playing Javi to your own will, the same as you have done with every other Telltale character who has come before.
I fear that the game might be turning into a husk of its former self. Ironically nothing more than the reanimated body of a game that maybe should have been left where it was.
I hope and pray that the next season picks up and that A New Frontier will serve as a great back-story to What Comes After.