Why Telltale's "Walking Dead" is so special to me

Walking Dead poster

Walking Dead: The Game will always have a special place in my heart.

It’s a game filled with emotional decisions and life changing consequences. The game made me feel sad, disturbed and depressed at times, but it always gave me a strong feeling of hope.

Throughout the two seasons, the game showcases a world where people don’t really care about “Opposite Gender” or “Deciding what goes best with what”. It’s the world which cares about only one thing; survival.

CAUTION: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1 & SEASON 2 AHEAD.

The first season puts us into the shoes of “Lee Everett”, a convicted murderer who is on his way to jail in a police car before a wild zombie appears and ruins everything. Lee is thrown into a world where he has nowhere to go and the only way of surviving is to run from the undead.

He eventually finds a safehouse where he finds a little girl named “Clementine”. It is now lee’s job to make sure that clementine is always safe. The game never really tells the motive behind lee taking so much care of “Clementine”, but it is evident that lee is guilty of his past deeds and somehow wants to redeem himself by saving someone in need.

At the start of the game, It feels like that the narrative focuses on lee, but the star of the show is Clementine. The main focus of “Walking dead” always has been Clementine.

The game shows how a lonely girl is able to find the sort of strength she requires to be able to trust strangers in helping her find her parents. She believes that her parents are alive, but all the others including lee think they are dead.

That belief carries Clementine all throughout the journey. After her babysitter gets infected, she hides in a treehouse and eventually finds lee. So the first human that Clementine finds after the infection began is Lee Everett. Naturally,

Clementine starts trusting lee and as more & more characters are introduced, the trust factor between Clementine and lee keeps steadily rising. Each episode had a specific purpose towards the story. The first two episodes of season 1 focused on showcasing how the world is reacting to the outbreak.

It shows early signs of struggle alongside survival. The next two episodes focused on the bond between clementine & lee and how they react to all the situations around them. It all leads to one of the most emotional endings you could ever find in video games.

Telltale cannot be appreciated enough for making such an engaging story with a huge cast of strong characters. When I played season 1, my primary focus was the safety of Clementine.

I wanted to make sure that she feels safe and because of that my reactions to certain characters changed based on how they treated Clementine. I was good to Kenny because I know that Kenny will keep Clementine just as safe as a duck.

I was rude to Lilly and her dad because they never cared about the people around them. It is the freedom that the game offers which creates such varied moments. I felt that my decisions did not create much impact on the outcome of the event, but it did drastically change my personal relationship with other characters.

That is the primary focus on walking dead, There were a lot of emotional events throughout the first season, but two of them stand out. The first was the scene where duck gets infected and his parents need to “take care” of him and the other was the ending where Clementine had no choice but to shoot someone who saved, trained, loved her and protected her throughout the journey.

The second season starts off really slow. Apart from clementine, I didn’t really care about any other character. Clementine is alone in this world. She lost everyone who once were by her side.

She is on her own in this post apocalyptic universe. I care about Clementine. I want to make sure that she is safe. I want her to survive in this world by being good. I want her to be nice to those who are nice to her and mean to those who treat her the same way.

I want her to be good in a world where good isn’t really an option. My main focus in the first two episodes was to keep clementine safe and because of that, I ended up trusting no one.

The group that Clementine eventually joins was able to gain my trust in episode 3 where they worked as a team. When Clementine finds Kenny in episode 2, I coudn’t help but choose the option of “Hugging Kenny”.

After getting seperated from Christa, Clementine finds herself alone. She had nowhere to go and she had no one to trust.So finding kenny was a big relief for her as well as for me. She does find a dog and tries to befriend him, but that doesn’t go well for her as she ends up getting a bit from the dog.

This bite changes the next few hours in Clementine’s life because the group she stumbles upon consider her bitten from an infected. She suffers excruciating pain before being able to earn the trust of the group.

As I said earlier, I never liked the new group and my main focus was to keep clementine safe. Throughout season 2, Clementine learns how to fight and survive alone in this world which leads to an emotional ending which was able to surpass the ending of season 1. Killing Kenny was the hardest decision I had to make in my life, but I had to do it to make sure that Clementine and the baby are safe.

All these events that have happened in the first two seasons makes me think where telltale will take the story in the next season. We’ll have to wait and find out when The Walking Dead Season 3 debuts next year.