The Walking Dead: A TellTale Game Series - A Gaming Diary

Review:

The Walking Dead: A TellTale Game Series is superb.  A masterful combination of horror, emotionally gripping storytelling and character work, and adventure game tropes and ideals; The Walking Dead remains one of the best and most influential works in its genre.  It introduces a number of immediately iconic video game characters and works as one of the best zombie stories in history.  It is not perfect by any stretch, there is some clumsy writing and some very odd pacing decisions, and at times it feels like the tone and gameplay are at war with themselves, but I feel like these are largely negligible issues and some of them are spawned from my familiarity with the zombie story in the first place.  Otherwise, this game is excellent, it rightfully remains in the discussion of "most influential" and "greatest" games of all time.  9.4/10

Diary:

9/17/25 - Episode 1

I'm immediately taken aback by how good the Walking Dead game is.  Like I was expecting it to be good, mind, I knew the Walking Dead was a good game, it's ended up on a number of "greatest games of all time" lists.  I just always assumed, however, that a big reason a lot of hype was put on Walking Dead in particular was mostly because of the franchise.  Like 2012 was when the Walking Dead was a massive phenomenon, this would've come out right between Seasons 2 and the beginning of Season 3 so the Walking Dead was at this point solidifying itself in pop culture as must watch television.  So I kind of felt like some of the hype for the Walking Dead: A TellTale Game Series is related to how big the Walking Dead was and presumably still is, idk, I don't watch TV anymore.  And part of that is probably true but like, man, the game's just instantly great.

I'm first and foremost amazed how well it blends the point-and-click gameplay with horror.  Other games have tried to combine these two genres, Phantasmagoria is a notable example and maybe a future game clear in and of itself.  But I feel like a key problem with combining horror and point-and-click is that it's really difficult to be scary with this gameplay style.  Like there's just an inherent campiness to getting a scare and then having to just click around the screen with the scare still being there, you know.  The Walking Dead manages to get around this by constantly shifting scenes, allowing tension to build by juxtaposing scares with calm, conversational moments, and utilizing combat and chase sequences to great effect.  Like it's not a super scary game, but it is very tense and gets you on edge at times, it always feels like a coiled spring that is about to jump, there's this overwhelming sense of dread that permeates.  It's a very effective tone, perfect for the source material.

Cause I'm just Glenn.

I was admittedly a bit disappointed at how much less of a point and click this game was than its predecessors.  I have played two TellTale Games in the past, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and Back to the Future and while I already like this more than either of those games, I did rather enjoy how those games took a classic, kind of dead genre and revitalized it for the modern day.  The Walking Dead still is a point-and-click but it is one in spirit only, it honestly controls way more like a more standard adventure game.  The only big difference here is that you do still have a cursor that you have to move around screen while you're doing standard WASD movement.  I know a few friends of mine have also expressed their disappointment at this change in TellTale's game making ideology, even though they similarly acknowledge that the stuff they put out after they moved away from being strictly point-and-clicks is objectively better.

I really like making decisions in this game.  Like this is obviously what the TellTale games became known for, their choices, but I think Walking Dead solves a lot of problems inherent in games that give you choice.  Like let's take for instance Skyrim, in Skyrim you have to make choices that change how the plot or characters view you but in the game you can just save scum over and over until you get a desirable outcome.  Walking Dead does not give players control of their saves, meaning that you are stuck with whatever choices you make, you HAVE to live with them even if the outcome is undesirable.  And boy howdy, are some of the outcomes undesirable.  I also just love that there's no "good answer", like, there's no obvious "this is the best option to say".  It feels like even binary options are about your personal morality rather than like "this is the best option for everyone".  Which is like another issue a lot of games with moral choices and multiple dialogue options have, i.e. Mass Effect having a very binary good/evil system where the latter options are so comically evil and undesirable that a vast majority of the players (iirc over 90%) chose good options just because the bad ones were like too far.  

Moreover, the game gives you like no time to think about the choices you're going to make.  A menu pops up and you barely have enough time to read every dialogue option or decide what action you're going to take before you make your choice.  I really like this, while I can imagine it's frustrating to make a split second decision and have the outcome of that decision just be totally screwed, it feels more right for this game you know.  You're in a zombie apocalypse, time is crucial and you have to make choices you might regret, choices that might make your party mad at you.  Btw, for the big choices in the first Episode, I told Hershel the Truth, Saved Duck, Sided with Kenny, Gave Irene the Gun, and Saved Carley.  This game actually shows you stats on what every player has done and I imagine when this game was new, this was super interesting as you could see what everyone picked, and given the Wiki's page on this, the results were shockingly even, but now you can tell it's been influenced by preferable options on repeat playthroughs.  Like the decision to save Carley initially had a 51/49 split with saving Carley being the less popular option but when I played it, it was like 76% in favor of saving Carley.

The art and music to this game are also pitch perfect.  The art style blends the sort of "TellTale" look that they had been cultivating for the past several games with the art style of Walking Dead comics.  And it's very effective, the zombies in particular just pop in this shared art style, it's such a good looking game.  The music is also perfectly Walking Dead, it's not like the best music of all time but it takes so many excellent notes from the show, horror music, and also country.  It creates this very eerie atmosphere for the game.  The music is especially strong during the more action-heavy moments, it really keeps up the tension.  Excellent horror music.

I do want to briefly complain about some of the writing quirks here.  On the whole, I think the writing is rather good, mind, I will be very positive of it in the following paragraph, but there are just some little things here and there that stuck out to me, you know?  A problem that the TellTale games have kind of always had is that, on occasion, the game will forget things that it's definitely supposed to remember.  In this game, for instance, there are a few characters where you will tell them the cover story you picked for what Lee and Clementine's relationship is that will immediately refer to Clem as Lee's daughter right after being told otherwise.  There's a later moment where when you arrive in Macon and hole up with a group of survivors in a drugstore, the situation escalates rapidly as everyone is in a panic about what to do about Duck, the little boy who may have been bitten.  It's a very tense scene, like, it's one of THE moments where I feel like the decision making is at its best because you're in the middle of this situation and having to find a path forward while the dialogue options are disappearing as soon as you can read them.  But then like, the situation completely de-escalates as soon as the conversation is over and everyone is just like.  Chill with each other.  

Poor Carley though, she got the worst of the kind of weird writing at times.  One of the sidequests you can undertake is helping Carley fix her radio, which she says is broken.  You can play with the knobs and the antenna but it turns out the radio just doesn't have batteries.  So you have to wander the drugstore and find batteries to return them to her to get the radio working, which is already embarrassing for Carley.  She's a grown woman, she should be able to figure out "the radio needs batteries" on her own.  But whatever, you get the batteries, hand them over to her, radio is still not working.  So you're like "oh cool, now there's going to be an actual puzzle".  Nope, she just put them in backwards.  There's even a guide on the radio that tells you which direction the batteries go in.  They just made this character dumb for literally no reason other than to establish a little sidequest so that she can form a relationship with Lee.  Oh also, one of the characters refers to a casserole as "hotdish".  We're in Georgia.

So anyways, Clementine is my daughter and if anything happens to her I will kill everyone in this room and then myself.  For legal reasons, that's a joke.  I can immediately tell why Clementine was the standout character of this game and, to many people, one of the best characters in gaming history.  I haven't even gotten that far into her storyline so far and already I love her.  First off, she's insanely smart.  We enter in on her having spent a few days surviving on her own, having dealt with her babysitter becoming a zombie and her managing to successfully imprison said babysitter inside the house while she flees into her treehouse.  She's depicted as very smart and capable just from the environmental storytelling and it's not one of those things where like, as soon as you meet the character she's not as smart as the environmental storytelling would have you believe.  Clementine's quick wit saves Lee a few times and she's very fast to play along with his cover, understanding it's what she needs to survive to, hopefully, see her parents again.

But, Clem is also authentically a child.  She feels so small in this world, so scared.  Her goal is to get to Savannah to reunite with her parents but Lee knows for a fact they are already dead and probably have turned.  While she is smart, she is prone to being quiet and distant, her natural shyness making her inability to process the constant barrage of trauma that much worse for her.  There's still a notable innocence to her in spite of this insane scenario.  She's very emotionally dependent on Lee, the one adult who is here for her specifically, and you can tell how both powerful and fragile that trust actually is.  Lee, and by extension, the player is often put in positions where he knows that saying the wrong thing to Clementine can fully destroy that trust and so the question becomes: is it okay to tell Clementine half truths to try and maintain this trust.  You are all she has in the world right now, after all.  Like it's just amazing how well written both Clementine and the relationship between Clem and Lee is, it is definitely what makes this game soar.  Also this game gives you a much worse written kid to compare Clem with to really highlight how well written she is.  Duck is the worst character so far, I swear, I regret saving him.

Lee is also just a great character.  We open up on him being taken off to prison for murdering the man who his wife was cheating on him with, one of the state senators, and this is the sword of Damocles hanging over him the entire episode.  He has the difficult task of trying to form trust with people while also not giving too much away about himself, a task that becomes more and more difficult as he is forced to confront his past.  The drugstore that the survivors are holed up inside in Macon is Lee's family's, and Lee almost can't even mourn his family because if anyone puts together the names "Lee" and "Everett", they'll know that their new friend, the seemingly good natured ex-college professor who is caring for a sweet little girl.  He has to cut himself out of scattered family photos and hope that his allies either don't know who he is already or don't think it matters.  I have to wonder if the decision to make Lee and his family black was an intentional narrative decision or not.  Like it seems so obvious that it would be given what Lee's whole story is, a man who was well educated and well respected who is unable to find redemption in spite of who he is because people are quick to dismiss him for the worst thing he ever did, think he deserves to die for it.  But also I could see the writers not really thinking of that and just going "well, there's a lot of black people in Georgia".  Wouldn't be the first time a story like this is given more nuance by accident.

I forgot to take a screenshot of Lee and his brother, here's the aftermath.

Lee also has the saddest moment in an episode that's already pretty depressing.  Like there's no shortage of sad moments, mind, Clementine whole thing is sad, several characters end up dead throughout the journey because of decisions you yourself have to make, there's literally a point where you have to choose whether or not to willingly let a woman blow her own head off because she's been bitten and the idea of turning is so much worse to her than the idea of dying.  But I think Lee talking to his zombified brother near the end of the episode kind of takes the cake.  We don't get a lot of specifics on Lee's relationship with his family but we do know that it apparently became pretty distant at some point.  After Lee got married and moved up to Athens, Georgia to teach, he hadn't been home for some time.  Which again, definitely has an interesting context given that he is a black man, so often in America black men are expected to reject their background once they've "made it".  Anyways, as mentioned the drugstore where the survivors are holed up is the Everett's, and Lee's family seems to be gone, and by Lee's estimate, dead.  That is until Lee notices a zombie pinned under a downed telephone pole is his brother, whom he only refers to as "Bud".  Getting to Bud is important for the overall group, Bud likely has the keys to the locked pharmacy and the group needs to get in there to get nitroglycerin for a survivor who has heart issues.

Lee walks over to his brother, who is writhing under this beam trying to attack him and just.  Talks.  For the first moment in the game, he allows himself to just be Lee Everett, to realize how much pain he's caused his family and to talk through his own baggage.  He apologizes for not being there, assures his brother that he loved them, spares a moment for a family he has now lost.  It's a very solemn moment, and a dangerous one, as Lee is on a street that is plagued by zombies who are just, at the moment, distracted.  He really can't afford to be having this moment of mourning, but he also can't help himself.  He's lost everything.  And after having this moment with his brother, a moment of mourning, of reminiscence, he has to kill him.  His goal is still to get the keys to the pharmacy, something that would be nigh impossible with him being a zombie.  Something I really love about this moment is that despite Lee using a fire axe and having the strength to smash it right into his brother's head, it takes him several swings to end the zombie's unlife.  Like for the first time, this whole deal is personal to him, it was easy to dispatch zombies when they were faceless monsters but now that it's a person he knows, he can't bring himself to do it.  And he has to slowly hype himself up, convince himself that this has to be done.

The game's just really blowing me away, frankly.  Like even with some issues here and there with the writing and the gameplay, I just already have fallen in love with this game.  Like I said at the start, I was initially like "well, this is obviously going to be good, but there's no way it's THAT good".  And I do think that this game wouldn't have become such a modern classic without Clementine, to be honest.  There's a lot excellent about it, don't get me wrong, but I think Clementine just being instantly one of the greatest characters in video game history really did just put this over the top.  It does kind of suck though because I only own the first two seasons of The Walking Dead so whenever I roll Season 2, I will have to be like "welp, now I gotta find a way to play Seasons 3 and 4".  I also believe there's a Michonne spinoff which is probably interesting but honestly I'm just.  Way more interested in the main stuff with TellTale.  As an aside, funny coincidence, the day after I started playing the Walking Dead, the new game by former TellTale staff finally announced a release date.  This is like how three days after I finished Okami, they announced an Okami sequel at the Game Awards.  Anyways, excited to play more Walking Dead!

9/20/25 - Episode 2

Look, I understand that we're meant to accept that zombie media just wasn't a thing in the universe of the Walking Dead.  Even the term "zombie" is just not a thing in their universe, they always call the undead something that they've come up with, most famously "Walkers".  So, I don't necessarily blame the characters for not immediately clocking that the St. Johns, this folksy family who are just kind of unnerving and unsettling and talk a lot about how many people have "moved on" from their care, are cannibals.  But from a player's perspective, it was so obvious that I spent basically this entire chapter just being like "okay, when is the big reveal going to happen".  Especially when the evidence kept mounting more and more that this was where we were headed, as we see like.  The slaughterhouse hidden in the back of the barn.  I do think it's really weird that nobody questions why a Dairy has an abundance of meat, especially when after Lee finds out what's going on he immediately goes "this isn't a Ranch, this is a Dairy!"  The way they foreshadow the St. Johns though was really neat, having a plot point early on be a bear trap without a latch to undo it and then the St Johns mysteriously appearing to the survivors shortly after that, only for Lee and Kenny to find similar bear traps later on when they investigate the hidden room in the St Johns' barn.

It's also just incredibly funny that they added a new character to the cast only to kill him off immediately just for this twist.  Like, I get it you know.  You want to do this storyline because you're trying to accurately establish the tone and beats of the Walking Dead series in a limiting format, and that includes doing this storyline.  And it makes more sense to front load it because as you go on in this saga, you will be put in more tense situations with more active threats.  This entry sets up the idea that there are bandits around as well as Walkers who have the capabilities to raid a seemingly secure location, and I assume those will be the villains for the remainder of the season.  I also understand not wanting to have this horrible thing happen to any of the main characters, getting eaten by non-Walkers is really messed up and a line to cross.  It's not a problem they introduced a timeskip to add Mark to the crew just to kill him off, it's just really funny how obvious it is why they added him in hindsight.  Didn't even get a character introduction where he meets the team, he just gets one line explaining why he's there.

I'm really starting to turn on Kenny. Kenny was a character from the first episode and in that episode, he is a father who was traveling with his wife and son and who Lee forms a friendship with.  In the previous episode, Kenny clearly prioritized his wife and child before all else but was still very loyal to Lee and cooperative with the group, despite butting heads with Larry, the oldest member of our current group and father to group leader Lilly.  Post-timeskip, Kenny is clearly going stir crazy.  He believes the group isn't doing enough for the needs of him and his family and, to an extent, I empathize.  Kenny is a father and husband and has to put that first.  But he's just like, actively making poor decisions.  Lilly isn't a perfect leader, mind, she also has a habit of putting her family first, she is stubborn about keeping their fortified position instead of moving the camp out of Macon even as they run out of resources, and she does a poor job of taking others' opinions and feedback into consideration.  

But Kenny is legitimately trying to undermine her at every turn for no other reason than because he feels she's not catering to him.  And this extends to the remainder of the group as well.  An early decision in this episode is whom to hand out rations to.  Lee only has four possible rations, Lilly is having to severely cut down on rations for everyone so they'll have enough to make it through the week, and if you don't give any rations to Kenny's family he's just immediately like "oh, so we're not good enough for ya anymore"?  Like he just fully doesn't understand that rations are really tight and Lee has to prioritize the people who look the weakest.  Although I did definitely prioritize Clementine with my rations but you know what, shut up.  Kenny's need to fight with Lilly is so strong sometimes that like, they are the only two people to clock that something weird is going on at the St. Johns dairy, but they're unable to work together on this because Lilly wants to just eat and take off while Kenny wants to overtake the family and set the camp up at the Dairy.  Like they just can't agree to go "okay, this place is suspicious, maybe we should deal with the St. Johns and THEN discuss what to do".  And then also he just kills Lilly's father which, regardless of whether or not he's right about Larry turning, it's also absolutely true that Kenny finds it easy to be cold and callous and "make the right decision" here because it's not his own kin and, moreover, it's someone that he ultimately does not like.

This episode, I think, does a very good job of raising the stakes in the question of the player's morality.  Having a timeskip was kind of a brilliant choice in this regard, if you kept it contained within the early days of the apocalypse forever you ran the risk of every moral decision ending up either too light because characters aren't willing to go to far quite yet or too intense for where the characters are.  We skip three months into the future, however, and we end up with a far more jaded camp.  They're desperate, and hungry, and probably have already had to make some tough decisions to survive.  Lilly implies that they've maybe turned other survivors away, only allowing Mark to stay because he had access to food.  And their designs look it too, the cast looks thinner and sadder and like the apocalypse has aged them.  Except for Duck, Duck still looks like a normal ten year old, what happened there?  Anyways, because of this change on the timeline, characters now have had the experience to know that there are lines that need to be crossed sometimes, that the world needs you to be hard.

This is also where our group learns about one of the most important plot points in the Walking Dead franchise: the virus that causes them to return is airborne.  They will return from the dead regardless of if they were bitten or not.  The dead don't die, literally everyone could be a potential danger at any time.  Which obviously causes a distinctive shift in everyone's morality.  To go back to the Lilly/Kenny thing, the reason Kenny kills Larry is that Larry had a heart attack and they were trapped in a small enclosed space with him and Kenny knew Larry was about to turn.  Personally, I sided with Lilly, trying to save her father, but like.  Kenny has a point there.  If we didn't save Larry, he would kill the lot of us.  It's an added nuance to the morality of these characters that, even as a lapsed The Walking Dead fan outside of this game, I've always found interesting about the franchise.  Is it, at this point, better to just end a problem, or would them being dead make no difference.  Leaving them alive in and of itself could be seen as either an act of mercy or an act of cruelty, the Walkers are inevitable, is it better to kill them now and let them become one or leave them alive to endure a much worse fate when the Walkers come.

Clementine pets the cow.

All these questions come up in this chapter, as Lee struggles with keeping his own morality in a harsh world and, by extension, keeping Clementine's perception of him as her protector intact.  There are quite a few decisions that take place in this episode where Lee has to potentially kill someone or cross a line that a child who may still have hope would get very upset to see her Guardian crossing.  Lee has the option to kill both St. John boys while Clem watches and it's like.  Yes, these are bad people who literally eat other people, but Clem is just a child and, moreover, a child who looks up to Lee as her guidance through this.  Killing these people will taint however she sees Lee regardless of whether or not she feels like the ends justified the means.  

This is also something with the death of Larry, Lee has the option to side with Kenny, to help him kill Larry right then and there and stop the possibility of a zombie getting to all of them.  But one of the main reasons you may not want to do that is Clem is watching.  Clem is trapped in there with the four of you and this will be traumatizing for her, and will be moreso if you were to... say... smash Larry's head in yourself.  At the end of the chapter, though, we have what seems narratively like a make or break moment for Clem and Lee's relationship.  After the party makes their escape from the St John Dairy, they find a seemingly abandoned car that's full of supplies.  The group is split on what to do with it, with about half the group voting in favor of looting it and half the group saying that we'll just be damning a person to death for our own selfish needs should they still be alive.  Clem is one of the few who votes in favor of leaving the car, not damning another person.  Lee has the option of either looting the vehicle or not.  And if you choose not to, you're left out of it.  The party who voted to do so loots the vehicle regardless.  But you stood with Clementine.  And that's important to her.

This episode is not as good as the first one by any stretch.  The plot is way more telegraphed than the first one, you kind of always know where it's going.  There's some not necessarily bad writing but some arguably clumsier writing.  And a couple of pretty major players from the first episode get kind of sidelined in this one, namely Carley and, presumably, Doug if you saved him, as they just kind of leave about 1/5 of the way into the chapter and doesn't come back until the literal ending.  But this episode is still great.  You see a high escalation of stakes and scenarios that test your characters' morality, there are some super tense sequences here and there (I didn't mention the tractor sequence because I didn't have much to say about it, but it's one of my favorite parts of the game so far).  We also get a bunch of foreshadowing at our next big antagonists, the Save Lots Bandits, a group of former grocery story employees who have now holed up in the grocery store to dominate Macon and the surrounding areas.  And the chapter ends with a very horrifying note: the motel our survivors have been stationed at isn't as safe or secure as once thought.  A woman whom we had encountered earlier on has been watching us the whole time and, moreover, had managed to sneak into the camp and steal Clem's hat.

9/22/25 - Episode 3

Well then.  A lot happened, lol.  I feel like if I wasn't on board with the Walking Dead before this episode, if I was just like "oh this is fine but I'm not like loving the game like so many others do, this episode would've made me love the game.  In my opinion, Episode 3 is just so good, like, whereas Episode 2 felt like it was kind of meandering because of a very telegraphed plot and a singular location, this one just goes.  It's a very tense chapter, a very depressing chapter, and a chapter with a lot of momentum.  And to top it all off, it probably has the best and most interesting gameplay so far, like, this is the first time this game has really felt like a true point and click to me.  Like, I just love this episode, let's get into it.

There was an actual, honest to god shooter segment in this episode.  Like, shooting is obviously a part of this game, every character wields some sort of gun for protection since like.  Zombies.  But in the previous episodes, the shooting has been little more than a quick time event.  You're put in a scenario where you're being attacked by a zombie in close quarters and you have to aim at the head and click.  In this episode though, the Save Lots Bandits assault the survivor's camp and you have to cover the survivors so they can make their escape and it's an actual FPS segment.  I'm not going to act like the TellTale point and click has stellar FPS gameplay, it's really kind of shooting gallery-esque.  You point at the bandits' heads and fire.  But it's still a really nice inclusion in a game that is this focused on gunplay anyways.  I liked it.

The train puzzle is, so far, my favorite gameplay bit that's happened in this game.  Like, I've previously lamented the fact that, while TWD is definitely still a point and click, it is lacking in real point and click gameplay.  It's focusing way more on the cinematic adventure game aspects of it, which is fine, I just sometimes wish it engaged more with genre tropes.  The train puzzle though is pure point-and-click, through and through.  It's this giant, multi-step puzzle with all these individual moving parts you have to do.  You can approach the puzzle in any order you like too, if you can figure out individual bits before others.  I also love how the solution to at least one part of the puzzle involved you remembering dialogue from earlier on in the episode, as Clem talked about leaf rubbing earlier on and part of the solution to getting the train going requires you to use a similar technique.  Great puzzle, I was really excited to get to do a whole big puzzle box in one of these games.

This game also wastes no time getting into the hard hitting moral choices.  The first thing that happens in this game is that we find a survivor who is being attacked by Walkers.  We can attempt to save her, or at least put her out of her misery, but doing so will severely cut down on the time Lee and Kenny have to spend on their supply run before Walkers come for them.  It's a very tough decision, one that really does ask the player "hey, what would you do in a zombie apocalypse.  Do you do what's best for your people or are you willing to sacrifice that to help an individual, even if they're possibly beyond saving."  It's a tough decision either way, and once again I want to shoutout the fact that every decision is on a timer.  You don't really get to weigh the pros and cons of anything you say or do, you simply have to make your decision and live with the consequences.  It's something I could see being a problem for some people but like, I love it.  If a game with decisions like this doesn't make you question yourself at least a little based on the decisions you made, is it even doing a good job, you know?

The game then immediately follows this up with another absolute gut punch of a decision.  When you return from the supply run, Carley, with whom Lee has started catching feelings for and said feelings are reciprocated, finally confronts Lee about hiding his past.  I can't even begin to wonder how this plays out if you chose to save Doug, but I hope Lee also catches feelings for him in that timeline.  Carley was an investigative journalist before the apocalypse and she followed the Lee Everett case closely in between jobs.  She's taken notice of the situation at camp continuing to deteriorate and she believes it would be best to tell people at the camp whom Lee trusts about his past before the next argument blows up and someone drops the bombshell on what happened to Lee.  

And it is really up to you who you choose to tell, and their reactions change based on what previous choices you've made.  In my timeline, I chose to tell Lilly about me and she informed me that she was already suspicious, that Larry had informed her that there is some secret about Lee.  But because my Lee was loyal to her when she needed it and tried to help save Larry in spite of everything, she forgives immediately.  Whereas my telling Kenny, who has grown to resent Lee because of the decisions I've made, has him appreciate Lee's honesty but confides in him that his past will be taken into account should we get to the coast, find a boat, and there not be enough room.  Not that I assumed Lee was his first pick anyways, given Kenny is low key racist.  There's a part in episode 2 where he just assumes Lee can pick locks because Lee is "urban", Kenny knows Lee is a former college professor whose family ran a mom and pop drugstore.  Oh also, I obviously told Clem, because Clem deserves to know, and she took it like a champ.  Love that girl, she remains my daughter.

The biggest thing that happens in this episode though that really challenges not just the player morality but also the morality of the entire cast is that Duck gets bitten.  This is a plot point that has been foreshadowed a couple times, the big conflict between Kenny and the group when we first meet them in Macon was if Duck had gotten bit and there have been a couple times where Duck has been almost grabbed by zombies.  But it finally happened, and from a narrative perspective, I'm glad that it happened so quick after Larry's demise in episode 2.  Not that I want Duck to die, I may not like him that much but like, he's a child.  Rather, Kenny was quick to bash Larry's head in with the justification of him turning being a worse outcome and when pressed on if he'd be able to do the same to Katjaa (his wife) or Duck, he was sure that was never a reality he needed to face.  So having Duck get bitten and having him slowly turn over the episode causes Kenny to confront his callousness when dealing with Lilly and her father, and the people he has allowed to die to save a family who is now crumbling in front of him.

Ain't gonna be no more trouble, Duck.

When Duck finally does turn, the player is given a choice to either let his parents do it or have Lee do it for them.  Which is an interesting question, would it be better if it were Duck's parents, that the last moments of his life were spent with the people who love him, or is it better off to have someone less involved do it.  Duck's parents are the ones who will remain, and they would have to be the ones who live with the scar of killing their child.  No matter what you choose, however, Katjaa will be unable to handle it, and off herself.  And I think this is very interesting.  Katjaa is a character who serves a very specific purpose, she is the person who has the hardest time adapting to the new world post-apocalypse, increasingly unsettled by the fact that everyone carries guns on them at all times and have to make tough decisions to survive.  In this chapter, Lee has the option to tell her what actually happened between Lilly and Kenny in the St. John's meat locker and, if you tell her the truth, she's horrified by what Kenny is capable of.  How far he's fallen.  And yet, when Duck was bitten, she's the one who seems to accept it first.  She stays calm and keeps thinking of his turning as an inevitability, while Kenny holds onto a false hope that if Duck just makes it to the coast, there will be some sort of cure.  But when the time comes, the one who seemed to accept it is the one who couldn't handle the inevitability, while Kenny remains.  Kenny survives.  And Kenny hates himself for it.

Speaking of the meat locker, man, Lilly's going through it in this chapter.  Lilly always felt like she was about to crack under the pressure put upon her by both her father and herself, but man.  She is not doing well.  She's become paranoid and stubborn, she feels like, save for Lee dependent on your choices thus far, she has no one she can trust.  She believes more and more that the camp should remain at their fortified location and not leave until absolutely necessary, an opinion which is getting challenged more and more by the remaining survivors who see the writing on the wall.  The supply run to Macon at the beginning of the episode is the last one, they cleaned out Macon of all usable supplies.  And now she believes strongly that there is a traitor in their midst, someone who has been skimming supplies off the top, particularly medication, either to fuel an addiction or to give to the Save Lots bandits.  A belief proven right by Lee's investigating, and a belief that fuels her paranoia more and more.  

After the bandits raid the camp and the gang is forced to leave, Lilly goes full ballistic, interrogating Carley/Doug and other survivor Ben over and over, trying to get the truth out of them, thinking it has to be one of them.  As tensions rise due to her investigation, and despite the urging of the singular person she trusts, Lee, to calm down, Carley/Doug set her off and she shoots them.  Murders them in cold blood.  Even she seems startled that she was capable of it, that after all of the hatred she put towards Kenny for murdering her father, she is, too, a murderer now.  Lee has to make a choice: leave Lilly or take her with you as a prisoner.  But it seems like no matter what you choose, Lilly will run off, not wanting to face whatever fate awaits her when the gang gets to where they're going.  The only difference is whether you strand her, or she strands you.  If you're keeping count, that means in this chapter alone we lost 4 of the survivors we set out with.  But hey, at least Ben's still alive, amirite (I barely know who Ben is.)

This is also a great chapter for Lee and Clem's relationship.  First of all, I just want to say that I love how the differing names Lee calls Clem in the episodes actually creates an arc for his paternal relationship with her.  In episode one, Lee starts out by calling Clementine either "Clementine" or "Clem", but in episode 2, after the 3 month timeskip, he's started calling her "honey", and by this episode he's at "sweetheart".  Their relationship evolving to be more and more of a father-daughter one is great, I love it.  But after some urging from a new recruit to the party, Chuck, the man who was living in the train they managed to get working, Lee finally starts training Clem to survive in this world.  Throughout much of this story, Lee has continued to treat Clem as a child, as Kenny and Katjaa did with Duck.  Trying to preserve their innocence in a world gone to hell.  But as Chuck puts it, "there's no more girls, no more boys, no more little.  There's just alive."  This is a viewpoint that Lee begrudgingly agrees with, an early point in the episode, after finding out that Duck was bitten, had him having a nightmare where Clem was undead.

But there is also a profound sadness to this training, despite it being necessary.  Clem is a mature kid, don't get me wrong, she understands a lot beyond her years about the specifics of the apocalypse and what we must do in it.  She has a sense of empathy beyond her years, but not in a way where it hits "adult in kids body" syndrome like a lot of writers write "mature kid" characters.  But she is still a child.  Earlier in this episode she was passing the time by doing leaf rubbings she learned in grade school and drawing with chalk.  She holds onto a Walkie Talkie her parents gave her and talks into it pretending to talk to her parents.  Like you really can't help but feel the loss of innocence happening as Lee teaches her to shoot and cuts her hair.  And more importantly, the two of them come to a harrowing conclusion in the wake of the events that transpired in this episode.  They can, ultimately, only rely on each other.  The group will break up eventually, either because of their personalities and ideologies clashing or because of the omnipresent threat of death hanging over them.  When that happens, Lee and Clementine need a plan on where to go and what to do.  Both Lee and Clementine have come to the conclusion that trust in others is only temporary.

And yet, in spite of this sadness, there's also a certain bizarre sweetness to this evolution in their dynamic.  Lee approaches teaching Clementine to shoot with the same parental support that you'd teach a child to ride a bike with, being very encouraging when she makes mistakes and physically supporting her until she can do it on her own.  Despite how urgent this skill is to learn, Lee does not put any real pressure on Clem, knowing this is a difficult step for her to take.  Despite Chuck's assertion that the concept of children and childhood is dead, Lee knows Clementine can't handle being treated as an adult fully yet, and needs to be eased into it with support and care.  The two of them evolve from a man trying his best to protect a small child to an actual unit who works together and supports each other.  Lee takes Clem on her first mission in this chapter, and quickly finds out her small size and craftiness is a genuine boon.  And when she freezes when confronted with her first actual Walkers in months, he responds gently, telling her she may not have done a great job but that it's a learning experience nonetheless.

Savannah is the next stop on our journey.  Savannah is where most of the cast wished to go anyways, Kenny wanted to head out to the coast to try and charter a boat to escape from the Walkers.  Lee and Clementine were always wanting to inevitably end up there because that was the last place Clem's parents were heard from.  And just in general the party wants to see if the big city is faring any better, maybe even holding onto a one in a billion chance that the outbreak has been contained and in the city, people are just waiting for it to run its course.  But with these hopes, however foolish, comes a harrowing note.  Someone has been talking to Clem over her walkie talkie, a device that the party had previously believed had been broken.  Nobody is quite sure who it is, but whoever it may be, the person on the other hand has been telling Clementine that her parents are still alive.  And once they get to Savannah, this mysterious person will reunite her with them.

 9/24/25 - Episode 4: Chapters 1-5

Scooby-Doo but instead of a dog, it's a homeless man.

I didn't have enough time to finish the episode last night which is why this is only about 75% of an episode.  Compared to the other episodes, not much has really happened so far in 4.  Like, things HAVE happened, this episode is always moving, but like.  Of the four I've played so far, this one feels like the least has happened so far.  This episode is very much a "we have a problem, we found a solution, but the solution causes more problems".  It's not a poorly structured episode, I certainly think it is a better episode than Episode 2, but it does definitely have big "penultimate episode" vibes where they're clearly just trying to get all the pieces in place for the finale.

The most interesting thing that's happened so far is our part stumbling into a protected fortress called "Crawford" that exists within Savannah.  Crawford is named after the real world Crawford Square in Savannah, Georgia, and its built around the actual location.  They first see Crawford from the outskirts of the neighborhood, a wall of bodies and spiked fence that uses Walkers on the spikes as scarecrows.  Crawford is a small civilization with a rather extreme view on survival, the citizens long ago chose to oust all the sick, elderly, and children, basically anyone they thought needed to be taken care of and who couldn't contribute to the survival of the collective.  The few survivors who remain in the greater Savannah area are either refugees from Crawford or live in fear of the people of Crawford.  The people of Crawford are apparently something of a fascist state, overly militarized, obsessed with power and control, and even though they do mostly keep to themselves they also occasionally go out into Savannah to loot, thinking everything still in the city belongs to only them.  Crawford is the shadow cast over much of this chapter, the potential big bad of the entire season.

I really feel bad for Molly, one of the new major characters we meet when we get to Savannah, because I know we're supposed to think she's cool.  She's this kind of ninja-like survivalist who has turned Savannah into her giant playground.  She has this very fascinating way of keeping things safe for her, she's learned to work all the church bells in Savannah.  She rings the bells to control the Walkers, since the Walkers follow loud noises, they'll be drawn to whatever church bell is going off.  Leaving her to scout the area for supplies without having to worry about the zombies.  She's quick and agile, stalking the rooftops in silence.  And her morality and allegiances are ambiguous, there's even a point where it's strongly implied she is not only part of Crawford but is actively trying to murder the group, there's a fakeout where it looks like Molly had gotten Lee alone to kill him.  On many levels she's a cool character.  But she also wields a climbing axe, and I'm sorry, after playing the modern Tomb Raider games, the climbing axe is just such a meme to me now.  I couldn't take her seriously because I was just fixated on the climbing axe, I'm sorry.

Kenny is really going through it in this chapter.  Like, everyone is noticing that he is still not handling Katjaa and Duck's deaths well.  Even Ben, and Ben barely notices anything, he loses a little girl several times in this episode.  Kenny has become even more stubborn than usual, trying to keep everyone moving towards the river to find a boat in spite of an injured survivor in their party.  He makes it abundantly clear that getting a boat is no longer their "best shot", it's their ONLY shot.  If they don't find a boat, then that means that everything, the deaths of Shawne (a person who you could choose to attempt to save instead of Duck in episode 1), Larry, Carley, Katjaa, and Duck, as well as the disappearance of Lilly, was for nothing.  He broke the group up and sacrificed everything, including his own sense of self, for all this.  So when he finds out there is no boat, he disassociates HARD.  He sits in the safehouse they found earlier in the chapter getting drunk out of his mind and pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist.  Until Clementine, the clever little darling she is, finds him a purpose.  She finds them a boat, a small motorboat that was abandoned by its wealthy owners when they either died, turned, or fled the city.

You can also choose to help Kenny start to heal in this episode by forcing him to work through his problems.  The safehouse that they're in had long been both abandoned and looted, meaning that, while it is lacking in supplies as a long term position should they need one, it's also undeniably a safe place at the moment.  However, it hides a secret: up in the attic there is a singular zombie, one unable to move.  A zombie of a little boy, identical to Duck, who used to live in this house in the beforetimes.  For one reason or another, the boy was left here to fend for himself, eventually dying of dehydration, his body malnourished.  He's not a threat, his body is too weak and decrepit to even move, but it is nothing short of cruel to leave him there.  Kenny is overwhelmed by the sight of him.  Like a reminder of his failures, still here to mock him, mock how he failed his family.  And you can have Kenny either face this failure or continue to hide from it.  In my route, I gave Kenny the opportunity to put this boy out of his misery, to give him some sort of closure for Duck, as having Lee kill Duck in the previous to save Kenny from having to put down his own boy, he feels he's failed as a father.  That he couldn't even put his own son out of his misery, let alone this boy.  But Lee reassures him that Duck was his own flesh and blood, and no parent should have to kill their own child.  But he can do right by this boy.  And so I hand Kenny the gun.

It's also just heartbreaking to see Lee's trust in Clem start to break down after the revelation about the radio last episode.  Lee now keeps ahold of the radio full time, not allowing Clementine to hold it, her singular lifeline to her parents, out of fear of the man on the other end.  Moreover, knowing that there's a man on the other end of the Walkie Talkie, has started to keep Clementine away from missions immediately after solidifying them as a team.  And we have confirmation that said man is stalking them, as he appeared right outside their safehouse as Lee was giving the boy they found a proper burial.  It makes complete sense why Lee is being so protective, why he is icing Clementine out suddenly.  But, while we understand why Lee is doing all this, Clementine is still too young to fully grasp what's happening here.  

Clem, ultimately, still wants to find her parents, a goal that Lee had just told her he shared in the previous episode.  This mysterious stranger is, telling them that he can help them on their quest if they find him in Savannah.  And instead of following up on this lead, her parental figure is keeping her away form what she believed is their shared goal.  Moreover, like I said, Lee told Clementine to always stay near him and that, after what happened with Duck, the two of them were a team.  That they would always do what was best for each other and always have each other's backs.  So Lee suddenly entering "protective dad" mode, and telling her to stay where it's safe.  It's genuinely heartbreaking, watching this little girl assert that Lee always told her to stay with him and have him make excuses why he's going back on his word because he's so worried about keeping her safe.  It's one of those miscommunications where neither person is necessarily in the wrong and that just makes the whole thing extremely depressing!

The next part I'm tackling will have our gang raiding Crawford.  They need tons of supplies, both to get the motorboat they found working, and to help their person who has an infected leg (not infected in THAT way, lol).  I'm excited, I really want to see this awful fascist city-state.  This is the first time in the entire game that we have a full party mission, every able-bodied member of the group, along with a few people they picked up in Savannah like Molly, are all going in on the raid.  The plan is simple: get in, go for the supplies, make as little of an impression as possible, get out before the people of Crawford notice.  Even Clementine is coming along, which is an option you, as the player, have mind.  You can tell her to stay back, and there's good reason to do so, the people of Crawford particularly despise children.  But I told her to tag along, both because the only person who would be back to watch her is the man with an infected leg, but also because Clem has a habit of going wherever she wants.  Especially when it comes to Lee, earlier in this episode she was told to stay back and instead snuck out of the safehouse and followed Lee through the Walker infested streets of Savannah.

9/26/25 - Episode 4: Chapters 6-8

Well then.  Egg on my face I guess for being like "this episode is good but nothing really happens in it".  The last three chapters have so many narrative twists and turns in it that literally when I updated some friends on my progress the only word I could say is "damn".  This game's so good.  Like, part of me was worried earlier on that I may have oversold it.  I was just, in Episode 1, being like "okay, yeah, I can see why this game ends up on a lot of greatest game of all time lists" because TellTale series can, and often do, vary a lot in quality.  I have previously played Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive people, which is admittedly a very weird game for me to play since I hardly know what Homestar Runner is, and Back to the Future.  Both games are good, but the individual quality in the episodes varies wildly, to the point where I'd even argue that despite largely liking Strong Bad the third episode does just ruin it.  But like, no, even the least good episode I've encountered so far is individually better than both of my previous TellTale experiences.

The twist with Crawford is, honestly, beautifully executed.  I think especially in context of where the Walking Dead was as a franchise when this game was coming out, this twist must've been so good.  Like, iirc, the Walking Dead's third season was starting, which is a season with a plotline about a civilization that had survived the apocalypse through extreme measures, the season that introduced one of the show's most iconic villains in the Governor.  So to juxtapose that with what seems like a very similar plotline and then turn it on its head, must've been killer.  So after the whole team gathers for this raid on Crawford, they sneak in through the sewer system and come up into the fortress.  And like, you are probably thinking "this is where the remainder of the game is going to take place, maybe they're going to find their supplies but then get caught and then Episode 5 is going to be an escape from Crawford".  

But nobody is around.  Which is extremely peculiar because, as far as the party knows, Crawford should be crawling with guards.  A few of the people accompanying us are ex-Crawford, they were kicked out for being in remission, and they remember that Crawford had at least a dozen armed guards watching the entire city-state 24/7.  Eventually, though, the team sees someone and after sneaking up on him, he turns out to be a Walker.  The entire area is swarming with Walkers.  Crawford, the extreme survivalist city-state everyone fears had fallen a long time ago and its entire population was now Walkers.  Their  survival of the fittest ideologies and insular nature had not caused them to survive the apocalypse, it had caused them to be more susceptible to it.  It only took one man dying to cause the whole thing to crash down, an inevitability they could not see nor prevent because they had become so insular they weren't told of the news that the dead don't die.  In one respect, our group takes this as a relief.  Walkers are much easier to deal with than intelligent humans with guns.  On the other, this is a massive issue, as if the Walkers are allowed to swarm, they will be absolutely screwed.

Finding out Molly's backstory was also a shocker.  Like, it was really obvious she was ex-Crawford before this, you are even kind of expected to come to that conclusion because the game is kind of implying she might still be Crawford.  But finding out that she was a young woman manipulated by the system into exchanging sexual favors for covering up her sister's diabetes.  As you'll recall, Crawford exiles or kills anyone who has an illness, anyone who "needs to be taken care of instead of taking care of themselves".  Molly and her sister actually lived in the area that would become Crawford before the apocalypse and so were just kind of grandfathered into the community.  Molly had been having sex with the primary doctor at Crawford, who also appears as a Walker that she violently assaulted; to both make sure Crawford never knew about her sister's condition and also to gain medicine to keep her condition in check.  It was only after the doctor stopped playing ball and Molly's sister got exiled that she realized how messed up Crawford was, actually, having accepted their rules up to this point as necessary for survival.  It's a really interesting backstory, to be honest, and it makes me kind of sad that Molly kind of peaces out at the end of this episode, I liked her a lot.  I still can't get over the climbing axe though, I'll never be able to take a climbing axe seriously again.

I feel so bad for Clem in this part, y'all.  Like Clem is never having a good time, she's a little girl in the zombie apocalypse who only just learned to shoot a couple days ago, but this episode is absolutely a low point for her.  Like, on top of all the stuff that was happening in the last section I played, Clem gets to Crawford and then immediately is benched because like.  It is dangerous.  But she's left with Ben.  We need to stop leaving this girl with Ben, he's the worst member of the party.  Ben is the cause of so many of our problems, and that comes up in this chapter,  But then she's in an elementary school again, because that was where the people of Crawford put their command center, and that's a sad experience for her.  It reminds her too much of the beforetimes, she solemnly tells Lee how much she misses elementary school.  

Then when the supply run is finished, Ben, which because we've left her with him so many times Clem has formed friendship with him, drops this massive bombshell that results in him potentially getting kicked out of the group right then and there.  Regardless of how Lee reacts to this, though, there's another moment later on where you're given the choice of leaving Ben to die to give the remainder of the group time to get to safety.  I chose to do this and immediately regretted it, both because Ben horrifyingly got ripped apart by Walkers instead of dying from the fall he took, but also because of how Clem reacted.  She says she understands, even says that her mom always told her that sacrificing yourself for someone else is the ultimate act of heroism.  But then, after finding a friend died, Lee drops the bomb on her that to board Kenny's boat in the morning, we won't have time to look for her parents, a thing Lee PROMISED they were going to do when they got to Savannah.  She's clearly heartbroken and, for the first time, she turns her back on Lee.

Lee also has a really tough choice to make regarding Clem this chapter.  Vernon, one of the ex-Crawford Savannah survivors, approaches Lee after the Crawford raid with a proposition.  Clementine is going to have a hard time on the water, she's a little girl, Vernon argues.  While all the adults on the crew can adapt to a life of constantly moving, Clem needs more stability, at least until she's older.  Lee, as much as he wants to continue being her parental figure, can't offer Clem what she ultimately needs.  Vernon's people have a stockpile of supplies, they could give Clem the safety and stability she deserves.  And you, as the player, are tasked with answering the question: would Clem be better off with Vernon.  You don't really have to commit to an answer, I sure didn't, but I'm curious what would've happened if I did, you know?  Would I have had to confront Clem now, talk it out with her, hash it out?  Or was this always just a point to set up the finale of the episode?

We had more shooting gameplay in this one!  I feel like I don't talk enough about the gameplay and, admittedly, most of the gameplay is these complex moral choices and the fallout of them.  There are some puzzles too here and there but they aren't super interesting to talk about, to be honest.  Like one of the puzzles here was "to get into the safehouse there's a dog door with a lock that is activated by the dog's collar, and then a grave next to the dog house, what do?"  They're good puzzles but they're pretty basic.  Anyways, the shooting segment in particular I found interesting is during the escape from Crawford.  There's this really good part where Lee has to play crowd control while his foot is stuck in a step.  Having to switch between shooting the horde encroaching on him and pulling his leg out, it's a great bit of gameplay.  Like I said in the past, this game is great at balancing horror with the very un-scary gameplay it has, and tense sequences where your character is trapped and mostly defenseless really help sell that.

So... the moment that made it so that I could only say "damn" when I updated friends on my progress.  Lee got bit.  This on its own is bad, Episode 5 is just going to be a march to Lee's inevitable death.  But what's worse is that Clementine was taken.  It's interesting that you're given the option to tell the party about your zombie bite right away.  Like, this seems like the kind of thing where the game would take over and Lee would want to hide the bite, you know, not want to raise too much of a stir especially when you need to find Clem.  But no, you are given the option to tell the party and trust they won't put a bullet in you right there.  And, in my playthrough, they stood by me.  The entire remaining party wants to use Lee's final hours to make sure he finds Clementine and returns her to safety.  After investigating Vernon's hideout, suspecting he might've taken her, they are contacted by the mysterious stranger who had been talking to Clem on the radio.  As Lee challenges the man, a hoard of thousands upon thousands of walkers descends upon Savannah, walkers the group had originally encountered while riding on the train.  And that's where we end off the episode, with limited time and insurmountable odds.  Just.  Damn.

9/28/25 - Episode 5

Well.  I'm crying now.  This episode was emotionally draining in the best way possible.  Like man, what a good episode.  What a good game.  I've been very positive on the Walking Dead in general across this diary, so it's no surprise it's making my year end Top 10 currently, but like.  I've already had to adjust it like three times because the more I think about it, the more I love this game.  It's currently just shy of breaking the top 5, and I expect it to stay there for the remainder of this year or get bumped down, it's a very competitive year this year, but who knows.  Maybe by the time I get to writing my list I'll decide TWD is better than Card Shark.  It's certainly the second most emotional experience I've had with a game thus far this year, only being surpassed by Mother 3.  Let's just get into it, y'all.

This whole episode is just nonstop tension.  Like, they do not give the party any moment to rest in this part of the game, they always have to be moving because Savannah is covered in a hoard of thousands of undead.  I really enjoy how active this episode feels as a result of this nonstop tension.  It first off serves to make you hyper aware of Lee's infection, as the party continues to move and continues to fight, Lee is just getting worse rapidly.  Whereas Duck was able to survive for most of a day with proper rest, Lee is getting worse by the minute, even after the group takes measures to slow the infection (in my playthrough they cut his arm off, I don't know if this happens regardless of what options you pick).  This tension is also causing the group to get overwhelmed and start snipping at each other, leading to a particular instance where Lee and Kenny almost get into a fight.  Kenny is, much like the player, hyper aware of Lee's injury and is the only one who wants to talk about what happens if Lee turns before they can get to Clem.  The rest of the group is, I think understandably, hesitant to have this discussion since the priority should be finding Clementine and Lee in particularly is pretty annoyed that Kenny is doing to him what he did to Larry after everything Kenny has been through AND everything Lee and Kenny have been through together.

I also really enjoy how much this episode uses gameplay to enhance tension.  Episode 5 is, probably, the episode with the least actual "gameplay", there are a lot of dialogue options mind but way more of this episode is spent in cutscenes than the previous four.  But when the player is given autonomy to do things, it's some really tense stuff.  A lot of this episode is spent traveling across rooftops, shout-outs to Molly, a lot of the ideas she turned the party on to in episode 4 help them out here big time.  There are a lot of moments where control is ONLY handed to player when crossing a bridge across rooftops, with the view looking down at the Walker infested streets below.  It really does an effective job of putting the player in the mindset of Lee, that you have to keep going even if one wrong move, one misplaced foot, one bridge that isn't as safe as you thought it was, is the end of your journey.  And it makes the moment where Lee finally does decide "screw it, I need to get my girl" that much more impactful.  After an entire episode of Lee playing it cautiously and trying to keep above the hoard, he goes down into the hoard and cuts a path through to where Clem is being held.  After all, what's the worst that's going to happen?  He's already dead.  He's been fooling himself that he wasn't on borrowed time.  What's important now is getting Clem back to the group.

This episode also asks you to make a near impossible decision: who do you trust to take Clementine.  Lee understands he's done for pretty early on, even with the arm being cut off potentially buying him some time.  He feels feverish and tired, he describes his infection like "the day before you start experiencing the flu".  Even if he doesn't want to admit it to himself, Lee is done for.  So he has to make a choice: should Clem be looked after by Kenny or by married couple Christa and Omid.  I haven't really talked about Christa and Omid, they joined the party at the end of episode 3, they were a married couple who was touring the southern US on a history road trip when everything went down.  Christa is rather intense, believing that keeping numbers small and mobile is the way to survive, a large group leads to too much drama, while Omid is a more lax, jokey guy who goes with the flow more.  They both adore Clem though, as does Kenny obviously, and it's really up to the player to choose who they want Clementine to end up with.  I chose Christa and Omid because even though we have more history with Kenny, they seem more stable than he does, and I want what's best for my little girl.

I'm curious about what the consequences of that decision are, though.  In a later point in the game, Christa ends up trapped inside of a building trying to retrieve Clem's radio and, to save her, Kenny goes down to save Christa.  A goal that he accomplishes at the apparent cost of his own life.  I say apparent because we never see or really hear him die and this game has never shied away from showing when a major character dies, so I think TellTale probably wanted the option that Kenny survived in case they got to make more seasons of this game.  But I'm curious what happens if you say Kenny should watch over Clem.  Does Christa fall down that hole and then urge the party to leave her, that it'd be easier for her to escape the Walkers on her own and her life isn't "as important" as saving Clem?  There are so many interesting divergence points that I'm kind of fascinated to explore but also just like.  Wouldn't be surprised if there's nothing to them?  Like while I would love for every divergent point to make a radically different story, that's just objectively not feasible.  Also, while I would like to go back through some day and make different choices to see the radically different outcomes that arise, part of me is also like "this is MY playthrough, this is what I did and didn't do, and I think that should stand on its own".

The final boss of the game: some guy.

I'm not going to lie, at first I was kind of laughing at the big reveal on who the main villain of the season was.  Like, the mysterious stranger has been such a threat in the narrative for two episodes and a little bit of a third one now.  He has been stalking us since we've gotten to Savannah, taunting us through Clementine's radio and has also appeared outside the fence of the group's safehouse.  You're kind of expecting him to be some big major villain, maybe one of the Save Lots Bandits who has chased us all the way down to Savannah and wants one final big score or maybe the last person in Crawford who wants to rebuild the city from the ground up by kidnapping children to raise in his militaristic ideologies.  But when you finally get to where he's been holding Clementine, the Marsh House, the hotel Clem's parents always stay in, he's just... the guy whose station wagon we found abandoned in episode 2?

But, talking to him, it totally makes sense why this guy is our final boss.  Despite being, by all estimation, a normal guy, what he represents is the consequences of our actions.  He was a man whose entire life was ruined by what the party did, even if you yourself did not partake in robbing him, you sat back and allowed the others to do so.  He tells you how that decision ruined his life, how right before that he lost his son in a hunting accident and that coupled with the robbery made his wife and young daughter flee from him, believing him to no longer be capable of protecting and providing for them.  He found them the next day, and according to him, they were already dead and turned into Walkers.  But I have my doubts on this fact, there are many signs pointing to him being potentially unstable and throughout the sequence of events he still talks to his wife like she is still alive.  Which sure sounds like a guilty conscience if I've ever seen one!

The stranger at first was only going to kill Kenny (oh my god), but as Clementine told him more and more about Lee and their journey together, thinking this man was a trustworthy figure who would reunite her with her parents, he grew to have a personal hatred of Lee in particular.  He throws in your face the worst things you've ever done throughout this confrontation, in my playthrough how we murdered one of the St. John brothers in front of her, how we abandoned Doug to save Carley, how we took her with us to Crawford knowing the risks.  He believes Lee to be little more than a monster, the thing Clementine needs to be protected from rather than the thing protecting her.  The Stranger believes that the best thing he can do is kill Lee and then raise Clem himself, that he's just a father who the world took everything from and he can protect Clem from the dangers that Lee has been unable to.  He is, of course, wrong, he couldn't protect his own kids from this world.  Moreover, he doesn't understand that you can't protect people from this world anymore, that Clementine will be hurt way more in the long run from trying to coddle her like a little girl in a world where that no longer matters.

I love that we never even find out his name, too.  Like it doesn't matter who he is, he could be anyone.  That's the point.  The Walking Dead does a good job of challenging you to confront how you would think in a zombie apocalypse and this guy furthers that theme.  He doesn't have a name because he is anyone, he is what happens if only bad things and bad choices happen to someone.  And man, the fact the music just totally cuts out when you're talking to him.  So good.  You are forced to sit and listen and reflect, the silence emphasizing every horrible thing you've done and the retribution you may deserve for it.  Like, I'm gonna be real, I know opinion on the Stranger has changed a lot since this game came out, I looked up some others' thoughts and feelings after finishing the game and it seems like he does kind of become a drag on repeat playthroughs because you could make every "correct" moral decision and he'd still find something to yell at you about.  But for a single playthrough?  I think he's a real solid villain.

Unfortunately the actual fight with him is nothing special.  It's very akin to a couple fights you've had across the game, you're close range with him and you have to use your cursor to block and respond to hits until you do a quick time event with him to try and end it.  Most of the fights against human opponents are like this.  The only interesting part about the fight with Stranger is that you are given the option to kill him or not.  You pin him up against a wall and choke him out, but if you stop you can just choose not to kill him.  I did this, thinking to myself "hey, this would be really upsetting for Clementine and even though I do concur with the idea that Clementine needs to be prepared for the world she's in, this might be too heavy for her".  Turns out if you don't choke him out, you just end up putting Clem in a position where she has to kill him to save you.  I don't know if that's the worse outcome still, admittedly, because there's a difference between "Clem shooting him immediately to put him out of his misery" and "Clem watching us slowly choke him to death" but, you know.  I guess I didn't save her from having to face a harsh reality of this new world after all.

I do just wanna say though, I'm so proud of Clem.  After we deal with the Stranger, we have to make our escape from the Marsh House and we discover that if you mask your scent with the scent of the undead, the Walkers won't mess with you.  Clem doesn't like being smeared with zombie guts, mind, but she takes it like a champ.  The big thing though is that we walk out into the crowd of walkers and she does so good.  She doesn't make a noise, doesn't draw attention to herself, sticks close to Lee.  That's my daughter!  Side note, this scene is very funny because having to slowly walk through a crowd of walkers really highlights how many repeat character models there are.  I always knew that there were repeats but like, it's very hard to tell 90% of the time.  Anyways, Clem, finally, finds her parents in this crowd, the two of them having already turned.  And she doesn't freeze.  Doesn't try to run to them.  She just accepts their fate and goes on with the plan of getting to safety.  I'm so proud of her, y'all, she's grown so much.

...okay.  Here we go.  This is the hard part.  So, after encountering Clem's parents, Lee passes out.  The infection has finally spread to a point where Lee is very clearly running out of time.  He's unable to stand up on his own and his breathing is short and labored.  With no other options, he tells Clem the truth: he was bitten and it's now his time.  Unfortunately, Clem has locked them into a nearby building, thinking she was taking the unconscious Lee out of danger.  There's only one exit and Clem has to get to it.  What follows is quite possibly one of the saddest sequences in video game history.  Lee guides Clementine through his last moments, making sure that our daughter is going to be okay.  He supports her, guides her, tries to spend his last moments imparting what wisdom he can.  He makes Clem handcuff him, in case he turns before she can escape, in case he's no longer there to guide her.  A Walker that they believed was not going to be an issue assaults Clem and Lee saves her life for the final time, mustering what little strength he can to kick a baseball bat over to her.  When she grabs the keys and gun off the Walker, a former security guard, the two of them have no choice.  Lee is out of time.  He can hardly keep his head up anymore, he's losing his train of thought as he's trying to tell her everything he wished he had time to teach her.  The two of them exchange a farewell, a last moment where they tell each other they love each other (though not in so many words).  And then.  Clementine does what's necessary.  I cried when it happened and I cried again writing this.

The Walking Dead is amazing.  It does so many things excellently.  It's one of the most emotional stories in gaming, introducing some of the medium's best characters.  It's an incredible zombie story and arguably the best Walking Dead story period.  It manages to balance being an effective horror game both with its more character-focused drama and its point and click DNA.  It is just superb.  It's wild that it's this good, to be honest, like.  This was TellTale's SECOND time moving away from the more LucasArts style of gameplay they had been known for before this and their first time trying this cinematic adventure style.  And it not only remains unambiguously their best, but arguably the best cinematic adventure game and one of the best games of all time.  It is truly something special, gamers were right in 2012 when they all got obsessed with this.  9.4/10