I was never a huge fan of the Telltale’s The Walking Dead games. I did enjoy the Second season, despite itself in many ways, but the rest of the games were “okay” at best. The first Season was an important chapter for Telltale and it brought a very new take on story-driven adventure titles, examples of which continue to show up and evolve to this day. But it’s 2020 now that I’m writing this, and Telltale Games, as the company it was, is gone. After years of showing how their formula was getting stale, how they simply couldn’t handle the amount of projects they took on developing they closed, never finishing The Walking Dead: The Final Season. Their business was bought by a different company that bought back the rights to some of the old titles and publishes them under the same name, even if the company behind it is different. And that company alongside Skybound Games, both with some of the former Telltale employees, were the ones to finish the game and release the last 2 episodes.
With this kind of troubled development, is The Final Season a great conclusion to the series? I’d say, it’s as good as it could be.
If you’re familiar with the series, you know what to expect. And if you’re not, well, I would advise against starting here. Unlike A New Frontier or especially Michonne, The Final Season is focusing on Clementine again, just like it was in Season Two, except with the character being far older and more experienced by this point. And due to that, understanding the characters and their motivations without all of the baggage of the previous seasons is pretty much impossible. There are far too many parallels, callbacks and the like that you’ll feel as if you’ve started reading the book from its last third. Because, well, that’s what you’re doing – it’s called The Final Season for a reason.
And because of that, unless you’ve been invested in Clementine’s story from the original game and haven’t cared about anything that happened since, there’s absolutely nothing that will interest you here. That is to be expected, but what is less good is that if you have been following the games, there’s not much new or exciting for you to experience either. The entire story arch isn’t bad by any means, it’s a solid conclusion to the character and her journey, but it’s in the whole interactive aspect of things where you might find the game lacking. Even if I still think that there was no need for any “seasons” in the first place, Season Two had a lot of genuinely difficult choices, from the ethical/moral standpoint. It wasn’t a game about an adventure of a brave girl, it was a collection of unfair life experiences of a young girl forced to survive a zombie apocalypse, full of ups and downs, but ultimately pretty dark and depressing, even if there was always a ray of hope at the end. The Final Season is, very much, just an adventure of a brave girl and her friends in a dark post-apocalyptic world. An adventure that’s designed to make you glad and happy by the end no matter what, because it’s “what character deserves”.
It focuses on leading by example as a main concept and while it is better handled and written than, say, Life is Strange 2, it’s also far less impactful than Telltale’s own Batman: The Enemy Within. Which, due to its setting and characters, could go so over the top and so melodramatic, that it conveyed the point so much more effectively, whereas Clem’s influence on the young AJ feels tame and the choices don’t have as much impact as you’d expect them to. And it doesn’t help that the whole “remember that” notification became such a joke by this point that I don’t know why it even remained in the game. It undersells the important looking dialogues by not showing up and making it feel as if that won’t influence anything, while also constantly lying because some things don’t, in fact, have no lasting consequences whatsoever.
This game is a solid conclusion to the series and if you liked them before, you will like them again. There are horrible action/QTE segments, some of the worst I’ve seen in years, sure. But thankfully they are rare. And the tech behind the game was clearly finally updated, so the game is visually really good looking with more emotive models and finer details than ever before in the series. It’s not the strongest entry, not the weakest. It has genuinely good moments and it’s well written. It’s not something that got me too excited or left any deep impressions on me. But I’d be lying if I say that I didn’t enjoy playing it.