--Clementine, The Walking Dead: Season Two
"I didn't know this man. I never killed someone that didn't wrong me in some way, that didn't deserve it. I tried to pretend he was a walker, but it's different."
--Jane, The Walking Dead: Season Two
The best parts of The Walking Dead: Season One are all reprised in the sequel, but the core components are developed even further. The decision-based gameplay has higher stakes than ever before, the exploration of the characters' philosophical stances is deeper, and the world has become more desolate than it was before. For players who have completed Season One, the game imports save data of choices from the prior entry and continues the story with the choices for Season One as the foundation. For those who do not have any save data from Season One, random choices are generated, but the experience is far more personalized for those who play through the series chronologically using the same Switch and/or memory card.
Production Values
The color scheme is duller for many background objects in the environment this time, giving some scenes an almost unfinished look compared to the rest of the game, but the frequency of these scenes where only characters or items close to the camera have their normal colors suggests that this was an intentional artistic decision. This is why some of my screenshots here feature grey colors in the background. Other scenes, however, are rather colorful, something that pairs well with the cinematic nature of the game. The realistic vocal performances only add to the cinematic presentation. This is especially important in a game like The Walking Dead: Season Two, as the bulk of a playthrough has far fewer moments controlled by the player than moments of character dialogue.
Gameplay
The presentation may be somewhat different in some ways, but the controls and general gameplay mechanics are the same as they were in Season One. Decisions made by players affecting everything from casual dialogue to the very survival of specific characters are the foundation of both the gameplay and the story. Of course, many of the decisions are more rigid than they would be in real life, as the limited number of responses often exclude the more nuanced or multi-faceted answers and choices. The options still allow players to influence who lives or dies, which in turn impacts how the major events of the story unfold. Which characters survive to which points and what the relationships between surviving characters are like are at least partly up to each player.
Story
Several spoilers are below.
After losing her former caretaker and friend in Season One, Clementine travels with Krista and Omid, fellow survivors from the last game. Omid is shot minutes into the story and the game subsequently jumps to 16 months later. Clementine meets new survivors after being found in a forest by Luke and Pete, which sets a series of collisions between old and new companions in motion. She is eventually forced to make some of the most difficult choices in her life when various survivors have a clash of philosophies and personalities.
Intellectual Content
Now that the characters of the game's world have had many more months to reflect on their circumstances and experiences, Season Two gives them more opportunities to discuss the explicitly philosophical and personal ramifications of a world overrun by walkers. Just as The Witcher emphasizes that humans can be the worst kind of monsters in a land full of vicious creatures, the game emphasizes that humans can be more dangerous than the zombies they are threatened by. Tensions between central characters build until they explode and force moral dilemmas of great consequences onto Clementine--and, by extension, the players.
The sheer ambiguity of trying to discover moral truths using conscience, a subjective tool useful only for helping an individual restrain his or her behavior irrespective of the actual morality of their behavior, is even alluded to in one scene. In a dream, Lee, a character from Season One, tells Clementine that morality is not like math because there isn't always a "right answer." Lee seems to mean that knowing the morally right thing to do is not as clear as matters of mathematics, but he erroneously describes moral skepticism as if it means there are situations where all possible actions are both morally obligatory or not obligatory at once. Even if moral nihilism is true, there would still be "right answers" about the nature of morality. It would just be the case that all beliefs in the existence of any moral obligation would be objectively false.
Conclusion
The Walking Dead: Season Two does not lose sight of what made its predecessor such a strong game. It deepens the emotional and philosophical qualities that can lend post-apocalyptic video games (and movies, TV/streaming shows, and books, of course) such profound characterization. It is indeed the characters that are the strongest asset of Telltale's The Walking Dead games, and everyone who appreciated the emotional sincerity of Season One will find a worthy continuation in Season Two. Clementine's story is by no means shallow, and she serves as a fitting replacement for Lee as the playable character.
Content:
1. Violence: Physical fights and gunfights are not given as much time onscreen as conversations, but there are still minor and major combat sequences that sometimes involve dismemberment. There is a scene where Clementine, like Blake Lively's character in The Shallows, gives herself stitches after an animal bites her arm.
2. Profanity: As with the first game, characters sometimes use variations of "damn," "shit," and "fuck."
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