When I wrote about Season One a couple of years ago, I ended by noting that it seems almost inevitable that Clementine would be the main character for Season Two and expressed disappointment that she must then either have plot armor or be killed like any other character in this franchise. So when this came out and it was revealed that Clementine really would be the protagonist after all, I managed to stay away from it for a long time, not wanting it to ruin the amazing experience I had with the first game.

Still, due to a combination of it being cheap now, it having good though not stellar reviews, a vague curiosity about what happens next, my wanting a shorter and more relaxed gaming experience after Cities Skylines and embarrassingly even the prospect of guaranteed Steam Achievements, I recently caved in and bought it. The upshot for me is that it’s a solid sequel and a well-written story but a far cry from the greatness of the first season. Basically I like the character development arcs and the story beats, but the writers had to really twist the plots into some pretty implausible turns to make the story go where they wanted it to go.

Going with the good stuff first, Clementine remains a great character and I really enjoyed how this sequel explores how she grows as a person independent of Lee, or indeed anyone else. She’s intelligent, resourceful and psychologically resilient. At the same time, I really liked how the game allows the player to choose for yourself how strong your emotional ties are to other characters. Like many others, I was leery at first that Kenny makes a return to this season of the game but Telltale made good use of him and it’s fantastic how the writers manages to distinguish between his philosophy of looking for his own, first and foremost and Lee’s approach of seeking the best for everyone, which Clementine can now champion with Lee gone.

The other characters are decent but the game is such a revolving door of them that they don’t leave as much of an impression. Maybe that too is part of Clementine’s journey. Fellow survivors drop in and drop out, at the end Clementine herself is the only constant and the only person she can rely on. It only makes sense that just as the stream of new people blur into irrelevance in the mind of the player, so too is Clementine less emotionally attached to them even if only as a survival strategy. The gameplay itself remains solid. Early on, I’d contemplated writing about how this is just a hyped-up visual novel but after playing through an action scene, I had to change my tune. Yes, it’s tightly scripted and not really substantial, but it’s impossible to deny that it gets your blood pumping in a way that a completely non-interactive game can’t and makes you much more emotionally involved in what’s going on.

Then we come to the less good stuff. As empowering as it is to control a competent Clementine and have everyone else acknowledge her ability, it does stretch your credulity. Despite the fact that Clementine is still visibly not more 11 years old or thereabouts, all of the adults basically treat her like an adult, reasoning that she wouldn’t have survived so long if she wasn’t tough. Carver even goes to the extent as seeming to treat her almost like an equal with the potential of being the next leader of the community he founded. The worst part is when the adults sit around and do nothing while Clementine is sent out to get stuff done. At least they could show them being occupied with other jobs! I had to laugh when the adults claimed that they had no idea how to turn off a wind turbine so she had to be the one to open the panel and turn the key and that was it.

My second complaint is how much this is a railroad plot and how strongly it feels like it. Like I’ve said the last time around, you can control what happens in this game, only how you react to it but the lack of control is really obvious here. It’s so frustrating that all of your interactions with Sarah can’t save her and they only matter insofar as they help define who Clementine is as a person. It’s getting formulaic how people just up and die once their part in your story is done. Then there’s the sheer improbability of many of the events like how everyone in your group survives the ambush by the Russians when they had you surrounded and they were armed with automatic guns. People always praise Clementine for being so level-headed but really she’s a walking disaster. Both Nick and Kenny’s group seemed stable and relatively peaceful for weeks or even months before Clementine showed up. But once she does, everyone dies in a matter of days except for her.

Finally, and this is more directed at all zombie fiction in general than this game in particular, I have trouble with how people are behaving and reacting. It’s one thing to be panicky and clueless in the days and weeks immediately following the outbreak of a zombie epidemic but this one is mostly set a full two years later. By now, those are still alive should be very knowledgeable about how the walkers behave and what they can do and very skilled at killing them. I keep facepalming whenever survivors hole up for long periods in a place without reinforcing it or setting traps. This season touches on attempts to build a strong community with Carver but it’s still pretty simplistic. The story doesn’t value the usefulness and power of human labor enough and keeps harping on the subject of scarce resources. By now people should be making their own ammunition, growing their food, know enough to send out parties periodically to thin down zombie numbers and so forth. I know that if a zombie story tries to address this rationally, it’ll just stop being a zombie story but I don’t know how much longer I can suspend my disbelief.

I have to admit that at this point I’m so emotionally invested in Clementine’s story that I’ll be back for Season 3 eventually barring some unlikely catastrophic fuck-up by Talltale. I’m also extremely intrigued by how they’re going to handle it since this season has at least five different endings and it’s hard to see how exactly this will be reconciled into a single sequel. But it’s obvious that by this point this series is being made only for those who have been onboard from Season 1 and is very much riding on its coat-tails.