The final episode of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier will soon arrive, signaling an end to the third season of the video game adaptation.
Originally released in 2012, Telltale's The Walking Dead game series launched into popularity for its extremely strong narrative that, to many, put AMC's show to shame. Using deep, sympathetic characters to deliver powerful stories, the game was able to succeed where network television had failed in telling a story of humanity in a world where humans had all but died out. It was emotional, it was gripping, and it resonated in the gaming community in an almost unprecedented manner.
Season 2 would deliver a follow-up story to the character of Clementine two years later, and while fans eagerly rushed to their consoles to discover what happened next, the sequel seemed to have dropped off in quality.
The new characters were either under-developed or unsympathetic, often wedging conflict into the story in fits of irrationality that felt more artificial than organic. The series, famous for its dynamic story that took player choices into account, suddenly seemed to hold little weight to them. A character saved by the player from certain death would have maybe 2-3 lines of dialogue before being unceremoniously killed off an hour later, as if to save the writers the effort of creating a diverging moment in the narrative.
This third and final season, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, was also the final straw for many fans, dropping further in quality and receiving consistently lower review scores with each subsequent episode. Players would frequently find themselves growing frustrated with the antics of the supporting characters, who seemed to develop an unusual need for the player to solve all their problems for them - unusual, because as we remind you, the player is in the shoes of a teenage girl.
The final episode for A New Frontier is scheduled to come out on May 30th. Whether or not the series will see a sudden return to quality story-telling is up in the air, though it never hurts to remain optimistic. If The Walking Dead has taught us anything, it's that hope can sometimes be the deciding factor in a worsening situation.
