The first season of Telltale's "The Walking Dead" is the game that put the company on the map, and the reverberations of its unexpected success are still being felt throughout the industry. "Walking Dead-likes" -- Story-based games with branching narratives built on binary choices -- are now a sub-genre of adventure game. Without The Walking Dead, we don't have "Life is Strange," "Dreamfall Chapters," or "Until Dawn". Not to mention everything Telltale has released since The Walking Dead has also been in that model. "Walking Dead-like" is now synonymous with "A Telltale game". It's what audiences expect and what people who license properties pay them to make. This...hasn't necessarily been good for Telltale, being that nothing they made before The Walking Dead was like The Walking Dead, nothing they've made since The Walking Dead has been as successful, and the people who actually MADE The Walking Dead shortly thereafter quit the company. This left the all but guaranteed The Walking Dead: Season Two in the hands of a new team, tasked with revisting some of gaming's most indelible designs, storytelling and charact... The first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead is perhaps best remembered for the moment where you, the player, have to decide whether to save Carley or Doug at the end of episode one. The gravity of this decision is telegraphed very clearly; no matter what you choose, someone is going to die and you're gonna have to live with it. Moments like these confront you again and again throughout the remaining episodes, and the game's stock and trade is getting you to wonder whether you've saved the right people, whether you've done the right things. But surrounding these big decisions are dozens and dozens of smaller ones that affect the game in subtler ways. Who you give food to and who's side you take in an argument allow the player to express to the game who they want to be in this zombie apocalypse. But they also serve as contrast for the big decisions. The game makes it clear early on that you will be making choices constantly, and that any choice may have repercussions. But "who gets to eat?" and "who gets to live?" will be communicated differently. When you make a high level, story-branching decision, you will know you're making one. So what stands out about The Walking Dead: Season Two is how it almost never draws that distinction. You rarely know the difference in this game between a high and low level choice. Sometimes the game tells you that a seemingly inconsequential act was a major decision. Sometimes a seemingly important act of bravery is immediately undercut. Sometimes a life you save is taken from you twenty minutes later. Sometimes a simple act of kindness gets someone killed. Everything is riddled with uncertainty. Really there's only one decision in the entire game that truely resembles Carley and Doug, where someone is going to die and you have to decide with full knowledge who it's going to be, and it's the last decision you make. Here. In the...in the snow...between Jane and... The first season of Telltale's The Walking
Dead is, at it's core, a game about the relationship between protagonist Lee, and the nine-year-old-girl he swears to protect, Clementine. (And to a lesser extent, their makeshift community of survivors.) Saddling the main character
with a child preemptively answers a couple of questions the player might otherwise ask. As you manage petty squabbles between a cast of antagonistic characters. any one of whom might get you killed, one question is.. The answer being that, however dysfunctional, Clementine is probably safer in a group. The other question is...well... What are the stakes if some dude we just met is maybe gonna die? How do we guarantee that's a difficult choice? Give players an impressionable child and
make her convincing, and suddenly they're asking "what will this do to her?" Will a decision protect her? Scar her? Toughen her up? Preserve her innocence? In a game about making choices, that little girl is what makes your choices matter. (ALSO she's our hope for the future of humanity and our connection to the world before all this and our main characters shot at redemption and that's a thing male writers like to do with young girls in dystopias, it's called the dadification of games, I put a link down there, you should read it. It's a thing.) But the protagonist of season two IS that little girl, grown two years older and seemingly a lifetime wearier. This inverts the questions she was originally meant to answer in some interesting ways. She spends a brief, early section of episode one separated from any adults and the first question gets answered...pretty handily. [dog growling viciously]
[Clementine yelling] Oh fuck! OK! Clemetine needs to be in a group! And she quickly finds herself a new makeshift community of assholes. But... The second question just...hangs there. With no central relationship, the first episode feels like a game in search of meaning. She's making all these hard choices, but what makes those choices matter? Midway through episode two, I got my answer. I was coming upon a lodge with my
companions hoping to find shelter and honestly thinking about how much I miss Lee, when out of the crowd walks the second half of season two's central relationship. Turns out everybody's favourite character from season one is...alive, in season two, and Clementine's relationship to him forms the backbone of the narrative. So season two cannot be meaningfully discussed without discussing Kenny. And the way the game deviates from the design and storytelling of season one cannot be understood without understanding what this new team of writers is doing with the character. But... One thing that makes it hard is that, by the nature of the game, my Kenny won't be the same as yours. But when we first met Kenny back in season one, he was just another vision of survivorship, same as most everyone else. We had people who mediated the needs of their family with the needs of the group, people who kept their heads down and just tried to survive, people who abandoned groups to go it alone, et cetera et cetera, and Kenny was there to represent utter devotion to one's family, and how we treated him was our way of showing how much we agreed with that philosophy. His devotion to family dictated that, for instance, if this old, dying man might turn into a walker, you have to smash his head in and argue it's for the greater good. And, at least in the case of my Kenny, first try to get someone to do it with you because you're just a little bit of a coward. And being "just a little bit of a coward" was the big tragedy of Kenny. He could talk a big game about what was right, what was necessary, and could maybe even think of himself as the strong provider who could protect his family from anything, but only when the walkers were on the other side of a locked gate. Whenever the shit REALLY went down, Kenny folded. All that "greater good" talk evaporated, he ran from confrontation, and he left all the difficult decision making to other people. All that really mattered to him was keeping his wife and child alive. The greater community could go fuck themselves. But then...the community got raided, his son was bitten, his wife took her own life, and we had to put the child down. So in the end... keeping his family alive was something he just couldn't do. And that's where Kenny stopped being a philosophy and became something... else. Something darker. An image of what would happen to Lee if he ever lost Clementine. (Also, I know we're taking forever to get to the point, but we WILL get there. Just hear me out. This is hard.) So how Kenny died (or I guess didn't) is pivotal. I know there's a version of the story where if you're nothing but horrible to him for the entire game, he steals a boat and leaves you in Savannah, but in the ending most of us saw, Kenny is presumed dead after sacrificing himself for someone else. For my Kenny, it was Ben; who was, by the way, kinda sorta responsible for the raid that led to the death of Kenny's family, and whom Kenny had been insisting for days deserves to die, but per usual never actually laid a hand on him. While we were escaping a house via rooftop, Ben managed to IMPALE HIMSELF falling off a balcony. And rather than let him get eaten by walkers... [gate slamming]
[dramatic music beginning] This was my Kenny forgiving Ben. This was my Kenny deciding that someone other than his own blood could be family. This was my Kenny finally doing what he couldn't do for his own son. Even as a purely symbolic gesture, this one time, he didn't run away. [walkers snarling as dramatic music becomes resigned, then peters out] That we find Kenny alive in season two completely unravels that entire character arc. And that probably should have bothered me, but honestly I was too busy pressing the "Hug Kenny" button. This is the first moment in the second game that just works. And the way it works is actually pretty sophisticated. You see, Clem and Kenny don't really have a preexisting relationship. They exchange hardly any dialogue through all of season one. But Clem's reaction to Kenny is credible, and provided the scene works for us, perfectly reflects our own. We miss Lee, because we went through some awful shit with him and now he's dead. And as we feel his absence, we're given Kenny; someone else we've been thinking is dead, someone else with whom we've suffered horrible experiences. Someone who's role in the first game
was to be a mirror for Lee. Kenny is a surrogate, for Clem and for us. The game has already started presenting its thesis. Which is a roundabout way of saying... And at this point, Kenny seems like the closest we're going to get. And the game is not subtle about the fact that Clem also lets Kenny feel closer to the family he lost. [Kenny gasps] Kenny's new girlfriend Sarita makes it clear that the only reason Kenny is remotely OK with everything that happened in season one is that he's boxed it all up and put it out of mind. So while Clementine reconnects him to what he's lost, she also reconnects him to that trauma. And Kenny almost immediately starts
getting erratic and confrontational. And that's not aided by the fact that, this is
a Walking Dead game, so no sooner is he's reunited with Clem than all the horrors of the first game come flooding back into his life. [sighs deeply] We'll just have to do bullet points from here. So the people Clementine showed up with are apparently escapees from a dictatorial community run by this dude named Carver, who raids the lodge in order to get them back for reasons we're not gonna go into right now. Several people die, including one of Kenny's friends, and the survivors are thrown into a truck and hauled off to Carver's camp. Once there, Kenny immediately starts pushing for an escape, and the plan they come up with involves Clementine stealing a couple of walkie-talkies. When Carver finds them missing, Kenny takes the blame, and in retribution... CARVER BEATS HIM 'TIL HE'S BLIND IN ONE EYE. So, when the escape does happen, Carver is incapacitated, and while they could just leave him, Kenny stays behind to SMASH HIS HEAD IN WITH A CROWBAR. And Clem has the option of staying to watch. [crunching/splatting noises]
[Kenny grunting] [sickening crunch as Kenny delivers the final blow] Outside, the escapees must pass through a herd of walkers, at which time Sarita is bitten, and while Clem can try to save her, one way or another, she dies. And at this point, Kenny really and truly loses his shit and begins lashing out at everybody, but stays close to Clem, because
Clem is now all he has left. Hope is rekindled somewhat when Rebecca -- [sighs] Thi-this is Rebecca -- has her baby and Kenny the family man falls in love with it. Then while making their way to the next town, they get ambushed by this kid named Arvo and his family, more people die in that shootout, and Kenny takes Arvo prisoner, choosing to keep him alive when Arvo promises them a cabin full of supplies. Still more people die on the way to the cabin, and when it briefly looks like the cabin is bare, Kenny beats the ever-loving shit out of Arvo. By this time, the rest of the group wants so badly to be away from Kenny that they steal a car in the dead of night and Arvo, for good measure, shoots Clementine on the way out. Clem comes to in the backseat of a car with the only two adults left in her life, Kenny and Jane-- ugh, thi-THIS IS JANE -- screaming at each other, and the fight escalates, and escalates, and ESCALATES until we're back here, in the snow, where Kenny is going to STAB JANE IN THE HEART unless Clementine shoots him, FUCK! ME! It's... as if these new designers looked at everything the first game was; difficult, complex, emotionally taxing,
but ultimately cathartic, and took from that only one adjective... Midway through the game, I chose to help a scared girl tend plants in a greenhouse, and to repay me for that kindness, in the next scene Carver threw someone off a roof because I wasn't working fast enough, and that's the game in a nutshell. Traumatise a little girl, give her a bunch of binary choices that don't mean anything, kill secondary characters at random, salt and pepper to taste and you've got a Walking Dead game. I didn't see what was going on while I was in the thick of it. My choices don't matter the way they used to, but that doesn't mean they don't matter at all. And this is still very much a game about a relationship. It's a relationship between a child and the broken, violent, self-hating man who wants to protect her so badly, that he might just get her killed. She keeps him near because she knows she might need him, but no one knows better than her what he's capable of. She sees a soft and remorseful side
that no one else sees, he's there to take care of her but she frequently has to play the adult and take care of him, people are constantly telling her to get away from him while he swears up and down that he
will always protect her, and he alienates everyone else who
might keep her safe. God, it's textbook! I've seen a couple people mention this, though only passingly, and most seem completely unaware, which is so strange to me, because it's only by understanding this that the design starts to make any sense! Whether or not you try to save Sarita, or comfort Rebecca's baby, or watch Kenny kill Carver will not affect the plot, and yet the game keeps telling you that these are major decisions, because they are things KENNY cares about. They are gestures of loyalty! Like Lee wondering "what will this do to Clem?", Clem is wondering "what's this gonna do to Kenny?" Which is a much more loaded question, because Kenny is not just a person she cares about, but also a threat if not handled properly. And the whole game is building up to one final question of faithfulness. See, in the first game, Lee made decisions on Clem's behalf, and she had no say in the matter. The second game begins shortly after the first, where Clementine makes her first, painful stumble into the adult world. She gets Omid killed when she leaves her gun unattended. The player has no agency in this scene, you cannot help but leave the gun on the counter. For the first time, Clementine is directly responsible for a persons death, but she does not have the power to prevent it. The arc of the game is bringing her from there to here, where she has the power to get someone killed, recognition of that power, and the
ability to choose who it will be. And all this seemingly muddled design, is what happens between those two scenes. The moments where she can get
someone killed but doesn't realise it, the moments she thinks she can save
someone, but she can't. The game does not telegraph the difference between high and low level choices because Clem cannot yet recognise the difference. It's not a game about empowerment or disempowerment, but about the messy grey zone on
the way from one to the other. It's a game about becoming Lee. About learning to make the choices he used to make. It's a game about growing up too fast, and under heightened circumstances. About lurching into adulthood
as an act of self preservation. The games question is, in crossing that threshold, will Clementine recognise Kenny for what he is? Now, if we accept this as the games premise, and acknowledge it's handled with surprising maturity for a computer game about zombies, we still have to ask, what are the
ramifications of asking this question? If the first game was about making you wonder whether you've done the right thing, the second game does something unthinkable if you either shoot Kenny, or let him live but then abandon him. Kenny: This is the right decision, Clem.
You're right... like you usually are. So the endings where Clementine is away from Kenny and he recognises that he's a monster are the quote unquote "good" endings. But there is still this equally canonical ending where the child watches her father figure murder the only other person looking out for her and then walks off into the wilderness,
happily ever after, with her abuser, and there's a fair number of people insisting
that this is their favourite ending. So if a game is going to pose
a question this complicated, is it fair to treat both answers as equally valid? But I confess, the biggest issue I take is this@ This is not my Kenny. Late in the game, Jane tells Kenny exactly what he is, and it's a perfect summation of how abuse works. And that exactly describes the relationship he has with Clem in this game, but it's not the relationship they had in the last game, nor is it the relationship he had to Lee,
nor his wife, nor his son. Remember: Kenny was the guy who caved, who insisted he needed more control, but ran away whenever confronted with it. Who threatened people with violence, but then when the time came to BE violent, either backed down or burst into tears. Kenny's whole tragic flaw was being too weak to take action. It's why he blamed himself for his family's death and why his sacrifice to Ben meant something! So for us to accept that Kenny went from here to here, we have to accept that the pains and losses from the first game
turned him into a monster. And that is the broken narrative spit from the lips of a hundred thousand broken people. People who say... People who say... People who say... They say it's not their fault. And while trauma may be used by abusive people to justify being more abusive, the one does not create the other where one didn't already exist. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand WHY they did it, why they used him. The whole question of loyalty depends on having some kind of nostalgic memory for a time when things were better; that
doesn't work with a new character. But accepting this Kenny, however well-intentioned, means believing that THIS is just the inescapable result of too much suffering. It means ignoring all the others who've
suffered without acting so horribly and absolving him of his responsibility
for how he treats Clementine. Cliched as it was, the Clem of season
one was our ray of hope for the future. One thing complicating our choices
was trying to strike that balance. Can Clem learn to protect herself
without becoming jaded? Or will the harshness of this reality cost her, for
lack of a better word, her soul? Which becomes a stand-in for the soul of humanity, because if a child can't be raised to live in this world without losing hope, what chance does the rest of humanity have? But throughout season two, again and again, Clem is given opportunities to choose between hope and..
something other than hope. Whether or not to rob this stranger
of his medical supplies, whether or not to ask this woman to stay with you, whether or not to convince this girl to save herself, and every single time she chooses to trust someone, she is punished for it, with betrayal, abandonment and death. There is no way to finish this game believing that hope is anything other than a mistake, except to stay loyal to Kenny, which even the designers seemingly don't want you to do. So what is our message?! "You can't trust anyone"? Is the correct ending the one where Clem crosses that threshold into adulthood alone, finally able to survive without other people? And prepared to raise a baby by herself
as yet another surrogate parent? This ending is the closest thing you'll get to uplift without turning your stomach, and it's still a hard one. It's part of that disturbing trend making
its way through video games right now, the one that says a female character only becomes strong by suffering at the hands of men. But it is an answer to the games question: who will be Clementine's new Lee? Clementine.
