The Walking Dead: Season 2 Episode 4 ReviewThe Walking Dead: Season 2 Episode 4 Review
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The Walking Dead: Season 2 Episode 4 Review

Reviewed on PC and Xbox 360



July 22, 2014

Telltale Games has a hard time building up to its endings. Ending something isn’t easy, but this is a storytelling team that’s proved it knows how to stick the landing. Yet — like The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead’s first season — Episode 4 is an odd lull in a story that’s built phenomenal momentum until now.

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Amid the Ruins, like many of The Walking Dead’s point-and-click adventure game episodes, focuses on the calmer, quieter side of surviving the zombie apocalypse. Its bursts of unexpected violence force main character Clementine to make difficult decisions that leave her, a young orphan, responsible for the safety of the people she cares about. In Amid the Ruins, that ever-growing number of characters starts to dwindle.

It does not happen gracefully.

People in Clementine’s life seem to exist solely so their departure can hurt her. Often, this makes for meaningful moments that define her as a character — specifically the version of her that you create by responding to terrible situations and potentially worse people.

Loss, specifically how Clementine processes and proceeds with it, remains the focus of The Walking Dead: Season 2. Amid the Ruins features plenty of loss, and some of the heavy decisions connected to them wield the same gut-punching power Telltale Games has become known for. Much of Amid the Ruins, however, felt like loss with little meaning, as though characters are being cut because the cast is too big, or they don’t fit where the finale is going.

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Characters vanish so rapidly and unexpectedly that it robs The Walking Dead of certain emotional value. Some exits are cheap, while others are unjustified, feel forced, or are forgotten as quickly as they happened. Worse, some of those unsatisfyingly departed characters are replaced by new villains — introduced out of nowhere, with no clear motivation — who feel out of place, inappropriate, and somewhat cartoonish.

In playing Amid the Ruins, I enjoyed discovering more about people we’ve spent little time getting to know. This episode spends a lot of time with Jane, the woman who helped Clem and her friends in Episode 3, as our young heroine learns about her past and takes lessons in killing zombies. You’ll also see new conflicts arise between old friends and new. Resolving these problems is tense and satisfying as it always is, but most of it appears to be inconsequential by the end. Characters disregard unforgivable and unforgettable past events to focus on new problems, which lessened the impact of previous decisions I’d made.

One fantastic scene in particular shows a grieving, despondent character clearly contemplating suicide. The performance is genuine, and it creates a heavy air that made me as uncomfortable as the concerned friends around him. In the scenes that follow a new tension snaps them out of it, but this person never revisits their own trauma, and never resolves the serious personal problem with Clementine that I created previously. For the first time in this season, I don’t believe in what certain people are doing fits with their character and their history.

Meanwhile, although The Walking Dead: Season 2 has been building to something bigger for Clementine, it fizzles here by the end of Episode 4, the complex political drama that’s been brewing between feuding sides all but evaporates. Bickering elders don’t seem to weigh on Clementine as much as the grim things she has to do on her own. She’s starting to feel small, despite the big things she’s doing. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing yet.

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Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps the desperation and hopelessness of The Walking Dead’s bleak world is starting to overwhelm Clementine’s story — one where a little girl begins to break, to give in, and give up on what little she has left. This could be where The Walking Dead is headed. Where it’s at, like the first episode of Season 2, is in an interesting place for one person, and spinning its wheels for most everyone else.

Originally written and published by Mitch Dyer at IGN Xbox 360 Reviews. Click here to read the original story.

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