Your feelings about the previous two seasons of The Walking Dead video game may be different than mine, and I suspect you can discern the usefulness of my review of the first two episodes of the third season by how far apart we are. I think I can summarise the previous runs with the phrase, “Little girl torture simulator”. Which is, if anything, a generous summation of one of the dreariest, least involved, interminably slow and hackneyed games I’ve ever struggled through.
Zombie stories are obviously woefully played out, and The Walking Dead offers the least imaginative portrayal of the form. Even the most patient of diehards are giving up on the ridiculous TV interpretation of the source comic, and it seems the last drips of potential have been wrung dry from the entire genre, with only outliers like Zombieland managing to find something of a fun last gasp. No one has the courage/imagination to do anything interesting with the theme (I think 2006’s okay-ish Fido was the last time anyone even tried), instead inevitably resorting to the same hoary old tropes of “band of people where one’s a wrong-un, one is secretly bit!”. Oh good GRIEF is The Walking Dead video game trapped in that dreary mire.
For two seasons they’ve had no story to tell other than, “Clementine goes through unimaginable shit on a daily basis, and everyone around gruesomely dies in front of her.” The tragedy being there seems to be the belief that this in itself is interesting or novel. “Look, she’s suffering so much! You think it’s going to get better, but no, it’s going to get worse!” No, we know it’s going to get worse. It’s literally the only thing that ever happens in any of the games, from the micro level of every tiny action inevitably ending in her falling over, to the macro level of absolutely everyone she knows fighting and dying. And Clementine’s character advances not a jot. She’s nothing, she’s an empty shell for the player to watch get tortured, and then have her say, “But I’m a little girl” for the 900th time. I empathise with her character’s plight not at the hands of the zombies, but at the hands of the writers. At this point it would be a shocking surprise twist if they didn’t murder a main character while she stared.
Where the series leaves me behind is in this genuinely fetishistic obsession with having you watch Clementine watch utter horror. Again, it’s the impression that this of itself is believed to be a bold or interesting narrative statement that grates so hard, where we’re supposed to be emotionally bowled over by their courageous portrayal of a child’s suffering. Yeah, maybe the first time. But after ten episodes of farcical cruelty it just became revolting. Only because the games were so boring, uninvolved and repetitive did I struggle to find the energy to care, but on some barely-interested level I worried about the minds that felt the need to just keep repeating the same theme.