Never having ventured outside the school gates since the world collapsed, the children have a hard time accepting Clementine and AJ’s instinctively cautious and aggressive behaviour. Getting AJ to stick to those rules while allowing him to behave like a child whenever there’s no threat becomes a marvellous balancing act as AJ and Clementine are rescued by a group of children who have made an abandoned school their home base. Time and time again, Clementine impresses upon him the importance of a set of rules meant to keep him safe from harm. The Walking Dead poignantly reminds you of your responsibility at the start of each episode: AJ sees everything you do, and you’re supposed to consider his personal development as much as his chances for survival. In an inversion of roles, Clementine, the eight-year-old rescued from a treehouse in The Walking Dead’s first episode, is now a 16-year-old trying to look after another young survivor, AJ. Over the years, it’s taught both Clementine and the player to always expect the worst. It has always confronted players with unforeseeable, unpleasant consequences, such as the death of a father figure or groups turning on each other out of desperation. Yet empathy is a crucial component of The Walking Dead’s storytelling: if you didn’t care about Clementine and the people she meets, your choices would mean nothing. The video games industry is dependent on teamwork, but the profit imperative often leads to an unsustainable environment that rarely meets its workers with empathy. Skybound Entertainment, owned by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, stepped in to see the game through to completion, but due to the abrupt change in circumstances, most of the creatives who spent years working on it couldn’t be there for the end. But just one episode into this final season, in 2018, Telltale closed its doors without warning, leaving all but 25 employees without work, benefits or access to healthcare. In 2012, the excellent first season of The Walking Dead video game made its developer Telltale synonymous with player-driven storytelling, forcing gamers to make choices that influenced how things progressed. I t has taken seven years to finish the story of Clementine, the girl forced to survive a zombie apocalypse with no hope of rescue – and we almost didn’t get to see it end at all.

New walking dead game review