Come on, don’t be shy. Come closer. Do not be afraid. Go ahead, I don’t bite. I know you want to hear this story. Come on, everyone is here, let’s not let them wait. Don’t be so shy, come over to us. You have a seat here. You will warm up by the fire. Make sure you sit down comfortably. Hold a cup of tea, you will need it, because you will soon hear the bloodcurdling tale of a brave girl named Clementine.
Where did we end it? Oh, I already know. So. Clementine and little AJ traveled away from people’s eyes for several years. Nowhere did they stay warm for longer, moving along side roads in search of food and temporary shelter. Armed only with a cylinder revolver and a knife, they avoided the hungry walkers. Teen Clem has trained Alvin Junior perfectly during this time. She taught him not only to use firearms, but also to shoot them accurately. Too accurate… But I’m deviating from the topic. Clem has become not only a guardian for her young ward, but also a teacher of survival in a dangerous world overrun by zombies and people fighting every day for survival. It is not known exactly what happened with the girl and AJ in the last few years. We know their fate only from the moment when, after falling into a trap, they are saved by teenagers from Erickson’s school for troubled youth. The seemingly safe walls of the school, however, had a terrible secret that Clementine had picked up on. If you are afraid of scary stories, now is the best time to let go and go to sleep well. They all stay? Okay, so listen carefully.
The immortal elements of every game from Telltale Games return, like combat through quick time events
“The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series – The Final Season” is the last season of the series launched six years ago. The first season of the most famous game, Telltale Games, is still ranked among the games with the best, most emotionally engaging and interesting story that the gaming industry has ever produced. However, with the subsequent seasons and other studio projects, the quality systematically decreased and in the following years Telltale Games did not even manage to get closer to its greatest work. An era is ending, but the developers made the best possible decision to finally end Clementine’s story and this long adventure with the popular brand by Robert Kirkman.
The fourth and final season will only have four episodes, not five so far. Slimming down the season should allow the creators to intensify the story as the previous seasons, especially the third one, had problems with the pace. However, the first and so far only episode of the season available, calmly introduces us to a new story, offering just two more dynamic twists. The first is the aforementioned accident, which will lead the main characters to a safe place and meet a completely new group. The second one ends the episode and turns inside out everything we knew so far about the leader of the teen group.
The variety are new, interesting characters
The scheme for building a new story has been recreated almost one-to-one from previous seasons. So we have heroes in hiding from the rest of the world who travel forever. There is a danger on their way that they cannot overcome on their own. So they fall into a group of people who extend a helping hand to them. One by one, we get to know all the characters appearing for the first time in the series to help them in their affairs. Finally, it turns out that not all of them have pure intentions. We know it very well from previous seasons and two spin-offs, as if Telltale Games were using the same scheme over and over again to start the story and did not intend to change something that worked so far. And it still works quite well, but it is more thanks to the aura-shrouded mystery of the school and the people who live in it.
So we will meet Marlon, the leader of the group, on whose shoulders rests the fate of the rest, the musically gifted Louis, the pragmatic and sarcastic Violet, the hysterical Brody, the several-year-old Tenn, who lost his twin sisters a year ago, his faithful dog Rosie, and a few less important characters at this stage of building the story. . Although each of them is outlined with a thick line, their characters and how they behave are properly motivated, so that you do not have the impression that you have to talk to boring, personalityless statues. The centerpiece of the first episode of the season finale is Clementine’s relationship with AJ. A girl can still pass on a lot to her charges, and often our task is to let the boy do something or to scold him for bad behavior. Clem has come a long way, and now she herself has to step into the shoes of her friend from years ago and take care of a not-so-defenseless child by teaching him how to survive. AJ couldn’t learn apocalyptic survival from anyone better.
The game has moments when the graphics can delight
The gameplay has not undergone major changes. It’s still the same game based on quick time events, exploring small locations, and moral choices. However, this does not mean that Telltale Games did not make a few minor changes. The greatest of these is, in many places, the location of the camera over the protagonist’s shoulder. Although now we have a narrower field of view, it allows us to better empathize with the controlled character, like in action adventure games. The controls are now a bit more intuitive and the developers assigned even more contextual actions to the keys on the keyboard, not the mouse buttons. A nice springboard was also the fishing minigame, where you have to press the left mouse button at the right time to catch a fish. The game also seems more difficult than the previous installments of the series. It is much easier to die in it and this is not only due to the fact that we pressed too slowly the button indicated on the screen, but many times during the fight we have to choose a certain strategy in order not to get eaten by the walkers.
There is also no point in looking for a revolution in the graphic design. This one is the best of the series and it can be considered the most beautiful game in the studio. The last production uses a worn-out Telltale Tools engine, which luckily retires. The studio’s next games will be based on the Unity engine, which should give a decent kick to the game’s visuals. Despite this, “The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series – The Final Season” looks very nice. The binding emphasizes its comic roots more strongly, presenting a setting that is even closer to what we can see on the pages of the comic. Character models are more detailed, textures are higher resolution, and the environment has gained depth thanks to improved lighting and better quality of shadows. In addition, the developers added support for 4K resolution and HDR.
It is a pity that we have to wait for the first terrible moment until the very end of the episode
The first episode of “The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series – The Final Season” is a calm, based on well-known patterns, beginning of the final story of the main character of the series. A skilled player, familiar with this type of titles, will now be able to predict some twists that will take place in the next three episodes, because the creators signal this to us more or less subtly. The lack of a graphic revolution and major changes to the gameplay will certainly not convince players to return who abandoned the series after the first or second season, but the creators once again placed Clementine at the center of the story, so it’s worth finding out for yourself how the story will end. which has been going on for six years.
The game for review was provided by gog.com
