“The Final Season”, the words I’d wish I could see come before the TV show are instead coming to fruition for one of The Walking Dead’s best-extended universe stories, Telltale Games Walking Dead series. Since her debut in season one, players have watched Kirkman’s zombie apocalypse turn Clementine from a bright-eyed and innocent girl into a harsh survivor forced to come full circle in her own adopted guardian role in The Walking Dead: The Final Season from Telltale Games.
Telltale Games themselves have evolved alongside their most notable original character. Despite the branching narrative choices, like any comic, Telltale’s story-driven games only allowed you to statically explore within the frames themselves. An experience that showed its age over the course of later Walking Dead series installments. Despite technical hiccups, the games have lived and died on the strength of their writing which fortunately was concrete. After a year of changes within the company comes the promise of a technical leap as Telltale is debuting a new over-the-shoulder camera system and unscripted combat sequences as part of new tech going into their future games. Through a demo available today on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, players can see an experience that aims to mimic the turn Resident Evil 4 took and for the first time experience moments that don’t feel as though your simply being carted to another cutscene. All while retaining the tension and gravitas of the story that entertained Walking Dead audiences.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season‘s first episode launches on August 14 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, with a Nintendo Switch version set for later this year. It will see the final chapter of Clementine’s story, as she’ll find herself in the same no-win decisions that have been made for her by guardian figures in previous seasons of Telltale Games The Walking Dead series. We know the season revolves around her protecting the orphaned boy, (born in season two) AJ. When the pair finds themselves among a new camp, it’ll unravel a mystery surrounding a whole new group of survivors. We only have to wait a few more weeks to find out who these new people are and why we’ll ultimately have to wipe them off the face of the earth, cause you know…parenting.
Go try the demo for Xbox One and PS4 right now, while it doesn’t demonstrate all the new under-the-hood features Telltale is promising, it does show an elevated level of polish to environments and character models. Zombies look distinguishable from one another, backgrounds look more like a game level design rather than simply stopping at comic book panel, adding all up to show the potential for something the series hasn’t had before… a true creepy visual ambiance. We’ll see if the final product can fulfill the promise, soon.
