This is about the last episode of The Walking Dead game on
Steam. It took me almost two months to
bring myself to play it, and I know that the internet has no doubt made its
rounds about this game already, but there are literary works, in whatever medium,
that simply demand response. The Walking
Dead series is one of them. And,
naturally, discussing a game like The Walking Dead, things will grow spoilery
quickly, I wanted to begin, as always, with a warning: even if I don’t
explicitly reference the events of The Walking Dead, it will corrupt your
playthrough and, as such, if you’re interested in playing The Walking Dead:
Season 1 and you want to do it without any external influence, I’d recommend
you stop reading. For what it’s worth,
it’s a spectacular game, well worth the time and emotional toll it exacts, and
I’d strongly recommend trying it. This post
will still be here when you come back.
The Walking Dead Episode 5 opens up exactly as you think it
would, right where Episode 4 leaves off.
There’s no time lapse, no change of events. Just a series of bloody, difficult decisions
that culminate in one of the most heartbreaking sequences I’ve ever played
through in a game. Right up there with
the end of Bioshock, Aeris’ death in Final Fantasy 7, and the bike section in
Battletoads, The Walking Dead actually made me clamp up in its final
moments. But what’s so impressive is
that it isn’t melancholy despite its apocalyptic tone or its dark conclusion:
it’s a profoundly hopeful game and, in a way, that’s why it had such an impact
on me.
And the real spoilers begin.
The Walking Dead opens up with a troubling decision: do you
cut off your own arm in an effort to save yourself from the infection, or do
you keep both your arm and wander through the city knowing you’re going to
die. In the end, it makes little
difference (I can’t imagine the instruments used were properly sterilized,
however, so maybe it wasn’t the bite that got me) but the choice it offers up
is a revealing one: do you accept fate or struggle against it? The vast majority of The Walking Dead players
seem to want to struggle against it – over 70% of the players chose to cut off
their arm on the chance it might save them.
Considering the circumstances under which the amputation occurs, that’s kind
of an impressive number.
In fact, the decisions that Telltale has tracked and shared
in the final episode of The Walking Dead all sort of make a statement:
specifically, that the future is worth fighting for. Clementine has been told by the bulk of
players to head off with Omid and Christa, the stablest and ablest of the group
that survives at the end of Chapter 5.
Kenny, rather than abandoning Ben to his death, chooses to fight against
the zombie horde, following an argument with the vast majority of players. Omid and Christa are bringing a new life into
the world. Lee fights his way through an
entire horde of walkers, coating himself in their innards in an effort to reach
Clementine in time to save her.
All of this would simply be grisly if it weren’t for Lee’s
impending death. Because whether or not
you take that arm, you’re going to die.
The group is slowly winnowed down, thanks mostly to collapsing metal
scaffolding, and even the most generous gestures, like Kenny’s attempt to save
Ben, end poorly. That the centerpiece of
the game is about a man trying to rebuild his family (and murdering a number of
people in the process) is telling. This
is a game about hope, specifically about what people are willing to do in order
to hold on to even a scrap of it.
The Stranger, in this case, represents an extreme: he’s lost
so much that he’s willing to take away anyone else’s chance at a brighter
future in order to escape his terrible present.
But in the end, he’s destroyed by his actions. Regardless of the choices you make up to this
point, Clem is going to clock that jagoff in the head, both literally and
symbolically annihilating his plans to make her into his adoptive daughter. He’s unmade by his inability to adjust to
shifting circumstances, but there’s something profoundly human in his drive to
build a world around himself where he retains elements of his old life.
Of course, it’s a sick, twisted fantasy world where he
carries his wife’s head in a bowling ball bag, but hey. The Walking Dead’s world is a rough place,
you take hope where you can find it.
This is offset by Clementine, and her horrified, yet
stalwart reaction when she sees her parents, all zommed up. Clem pauses for a moment, seeing the family
she misses, a family that she could easily make herself a part of (as a zombie)
but when the chips are down she doesn’t hold out hope for an outlandish cure:
she recognizes her circumstances and does her best to save Lee. That she acts without knowing he’s been
bitten doesn’t change much: Clem has made a new family, and she’s not going to
abandon it by looking back on the family she once had. And when the time comes, she shows that she’s
willing to do whatever it takes to keep going, to keep hope alive and, in a
sense, make Lee proud. The moment where
she said “I will” when I told her to keep her hair short made me tear up. I’m not ashamed: that was some masterful
writing, and after that bonding moment on the train, I don’t see how anyone
could keep a dry eye watching Clem say goodbye to Lee.
This all might be a byproduct of my playthrough. I don’t know.
It’s tough to really discuss The Walking Dead at length, since it’s so
heavily rooted in one’s particular experience, and I certainly did my best to
make my playthrough an optimistic one: I tried to keep Clem safe as I could and
keep her as whole as I could, never letting her compromise her values for the sake
of survival, never taking the easy way out.
I tried to be a dad to her, or at least what I’d imagine a dad should be
like, and in the end I seemed to get some props from a handful of characters. Molly seemed okay with the idea of me as a
dad at the end of Chapter 4. I wanted to
make the world of The Walking Dead a world where hope was alive.
And I’m going to put some of that on Telltale. Why else have you play through a final
chapter of a game where you’re dying, where your body and mind are both
deteriorating and you’re forced to face your fate time and time again if not to
show some sort of hope at the core of the human experience? Sure, we can be monstrous creatures too, foul
and selfish and shortsighted, but given a chance, it seems like we’ll do what
we can to make sure life keeps going on.
Even if it goes on without us.
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