The Walking Dead was one of the biggest TV phenomena to ever occur. It’s only being supplanted by its own dwindling quality and the rise of Game of Thrones. The popularity of it resulted in Telltale Games’ series The Walking Dead: Definitive Series. This features 4 seasons of stories of characters who are(mostly) not in the show and one season centering on Michonne. I played The Walking Dead: Telltale Seasons 1 and 2 shortly after high school. When I saw that the whole collection was on sale, I grabbed it right away, eager to learn how Clementine’s story ended.

The Walking Dead: Season 1

The game that started it all. The Walking Dead Season 1 focuses on Lee, a convicted murderer who was accidentally set free at the onset of the zombie apocalypse. Shortly after he escapes from the cop car, he meets Clementine, the primary character in the series. The rest of the game follows Lee on his journey to protect Clementine and his group from walkers and opposing groups, where you must make difficult decisions to save lives. In the classic Telltale fashion, this game is primarily a visual novel with occasional quick-time and shooting minigames to keep you engaged. You are here to experience the characters and their interactions with one another. 

The game is amazing. The character depth is incredible, and the choices you have to make are hard and game-altering. The responses of the characters to your choices are unique and logical. Some moments aren’t logical because how can someone be logical in some of these situations? The development of the relationship between Lee and Clementine is adorable and slowly builds toward gut punches as she is placed in danger. Clementine is, of course, one of the highlights of the game. She is sweet, and Lee being forced to take on the role of being a father for her has him making some interesting decisions, as well. 

Lee is an incredible protagonist for this kind of game. He has a dark history and a complicated relationship with his family, but he wants to do the right thing most of the time. His complexity makes the choices compelling because he is a flawed man. Something else that the first game acknowledges that later seasons seem to forget is the threat of walkers. In later games, you can wade through them, and they are more of a nuisance than an actual threat. The other games rely heavily on “the real monsters are other people”. Even replaying it 10 years after my first playthrough, I still felt the emotional moments.

Verdict: I give it an easy 10/10.

The Walking Dead: Season 2

The second game presents Clementine as the new primary protagonist. The general formula is the same. However, there are fewer opportunities to get to know some characters, unlike in Season 1, where the player has ample opportunities to talk to every character at least once in every scene. Season 2 often has scenes where characters offer no dialogue. This was replaced by more quick-time events and shooting minigames. The second game is also far shorter than the first one. Getting less game when it was still pretty solid and fun was another downside I felt in Season 2. I also felt that Clementine being the protagonist was an issue with the game.

Please allow me to clarify. Clementine is around 10 years old in the second game since it takes place right after the events of the first. This means that, in general, Clementine is not going to be presented with the same kinds of moral questions that Lee faced. She’s simply not equipped to handle them. She also has significantly less agency because she is a child. There are only a few hard choices that make major contributions to her development as a person. 

That being said, I still loved the second game. However, there is one more issue I have with Season 2. AJ, a child born to one of the characters at the end of episode 4, is one of my greatest issues with the later seasons of the game. I will expand on that when I discuss Season 4. The final scene of The Walking Dead Season 2 is incredible, truly incomparable in the series. One of the most difficult decisions a player will have to make throughout their play-through. I consider Season 2 of The Walking Dead to be a good game.

Verdict: I give it a solid 8 or 9/10.

The Walking Dead: Season 3

Here is where The Walking Dead series started to lose me. In this game, you do not play as Clementine for the majority of the time. Most of the time, you are playing a new character named Javi. Javi is a disgraced baseball player who has a complicated family situation. At the onset of the apocalypse, he found himself stuck with his brother’s children and his brother’s wife. He protects them during the third game, going on adventures and meeting people. I did not like Javi, or most of the characters for that matter, at first, but they eventually did grow on me. Some of them.

At this point, much like the show, The Walking Dead’s formula had grown quite stale. It was much the same every game; your group meets a bad group, and they try to take you or worse. Additionally, Season 3 had far less character interaction than Season 1 and even less than Season 2. Javi’s best friend and his brother’s wife, Kate, is also one of the most annoying and selfish characters I’ve yet to see in a Walking Dead game.  She is, generally, quite awful and puts Javi in very difficult decisions before and after the apocalypse for seemingly no reason.

Now, for Clementine. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the central character of the 2 previous games was made into a side character. They tried to explain it with what happened in between Seasons 2 and 3, but I would rather have seen Clementine’s time alone with AJ and the New Frontier than what I got in Season 3. At this time, she is a teenager, she’s jaded, she’s a hardened survivor.  Overall, though, it was not a bad game.

Verdict: I would still give The Walking Dead: Season 3 a high 6 or solid 7.

The Walking Dead: Season 4

This is a difficult section to write. There are moments where I feel like some of what was good about the first two seasons has returned. On the upside, Clementine is back as the main character, and she recovered AJ at the end of Season 3. The game is a full episode shorter than the previous three. The majority of the characters in Season 4 are children, generally around Clementine’s current age, which is around 15 at this point. This sort of gets around my issue with putting Clementine center stage in Season 2 because all of them are children, so they’re all equal. Let’s discuss my first issue, the one I mentioned before.

AJ is an issue in the series. This was one of the things they decided to do in the show as well: add a baby. Babies are extreme liabilities in The Walking Dead’s world because walkers are primarily attracted to noise, and babies are loud. The series essentially skipped that and went to AJ’s toddler phase. The reason I feel that AJ is a detriment to the series is that it is a character that cannot be killed off. Knowing this, they tried to recreate the dynamic between Clementine and Lee. Clementine becomes AJ’s Lee, and the game centers around teaching him what is wrong and what is right. 

Even though they are children and there isn’t a lot of time to get to know them, I found them to be more compelling and interesting characters than most of the ones you meet in 3. There are interesting and difficult decisions to make throughout the game, primarily because of AJ, and steering him in the right direction is sometimes complicated. I thought it brought back a lot of what I liked from earlier games.

Verdict: Despite the negatives I had, it isn’t a bad game. I still give it a solid 7/10. In my opinion, it is better than Season 3.

The Walking Dead: Michonne

This three-episode entry is confusing as to why it is even here. This is almost completely disconnected from the events of the original series. There is no Clementine, there are no characters from the other games. Only one familiar scene from the ending of Season 4. This game follows Michonne on an adventure with some merchant sailors. Generally, it features the same issues I had with the later entries in the series.

Due to how short the game is, I felt no point in investing in the characters emotionally. Not that you can even talk to them at most points. This had the greatest amount of railroading of the series. Even when trying not to help the “good guys” of the game, you are forced to help them. The choices in this one seemed particularly meaningless because of this. Even though I did not help Sam, she still fully trusted me. 

Michonne has an interesting relationship with her daughters during the game, which is represented in hallucinations. Unfortunately, there is no time to explore this because the game is only 3 episodes, and each episode is about an hour and a half long.

Verdict: Overall, this is the worst of the game series by far. I give it a 5/10 at best.

Final Thoughts

There you have it. A full review of all five games in Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. I was completely hooked on it and played through Season 1-4 almost non-stop(I did take a 2 or 3-day break before deciding to play Michonne as well). Overall, I did have a pleasant experience(even though these games are incredibly depressing at times) and would recommend the series, everyone should give it a shot.