Not content with accolades out the wazoo for the first season of The Walking Dead, Telltale has set their sights high for the next season. Namely, they want to see if they can trigger a wave of suicides, because this is the single most depressing game you’ll play all year, and Telltale put it out in winter. Great timing, guys. This review will be spoiler-free.
The Walking Dead: Season Two is essentially a game about trust. The game picks up with Clementine, who is about 400 days older chronologically and about 4,000 years older emotionally. Nobody trusts you, and, if you’re smart, you don’t trust anybody completely.
The best (or worst) part is that this is very much a game defined by Jean Renoir’s famous quote that the real hell of life is that everyone has his reasons. There are few, if any, grade-A hissable monsters in this game. They just have been screwed so often they don’t trust anybody, and that includes a preteen girl. It’s pretty easy to burn a bridge in this game, and very hard to build one. And worse, the game sets you up to quite possibly throw your fellow humans under the bus.
Beyond that, this is a difficult game to review because, well, it feels a bit incomplete. There’s a reason for that, obviously; it’s one fifth of a full game. But especially on the heels of The Wolf Among Us, this feels a bit incomplete on its own. It’s undeniably a great game, and it sets up a lot for future episodes, but individually, it feels like there’s a bit less to it than there should be.
Interestingly, picking up where you left off has a very organic feel to it. Your decisions in previous episodes affect the game in subtle and unsubtle ways, and part of the fun is seeing how it’s piled up.
Either way, though, it’s a worthy successor. Just prepare to be a bit depressed by the end of your playthrough.