It has taken six months to get to the finale of TellTale Game’s The Walking Dead: A New Frontier. The trudge to get through this third full season of the series has been rather painful for me and unsurprising, Telltale’s focus has already shifted to the second episode of Guardians of the Galaxy, releasing just one week following this final episode. That said, a lot has been put into marketing this final episode as a big finish for players, one tailored to deliver the best finale in the series to date. But in reality, it only served to cement just how tired this series has become.
*Spoiler Warning: Choices made in previous episodes will be talked about*
Episode five takes us back to the big finish of episode four, where following the final betrayal by Joan saw Kate come crashing through the city of Richmond only to crash into one of the city walls, causing a breach which allowed the horde of Walkers to start pouring through setting up the final battle of sorts for this entry to the series. It is a story device that will ultimately offer the player a choice between two possible endings depending on what the player picks but I will come back to how that plays out a little further on.
Family is really the main theme of A New Frontier. Fighting to protect it, trying to keep it together no matter what and ultimately, what a person may have to sacrifice to keep that family protected. It is a theme that is laid on very heavily in this finale, the opening flashback to Javier and David playing dominoes with their father just before they discover he has Cancer but is refusing to take the treatment for it lays the foundation for the animosity between the brothers we see in this series. The game in a not so subtle manner, tries to encourage the player to side more with David, to reform the brotherly bond which by the finale has completely gone. As a fan of Telltale games, I prefer it when relationship choices are my own, based upon the story and how I feel towards them. I really do not like it when the story tries to influence or directly tell me how I should make my choices in order to trigger a particular outcome in the episode.
As with previous series finale episodes, it offers plenty of opportunities for the player to reflect back on previous choices made along the way, and the dialogue for this episode for me failed to do it well. Instead we see interactions between characters, reacting to events and player choices suddenly change their view mid dialogue. Eleanor who in my playthrough is now the only remaining survivor from Prescott, is angry with Javier for the death of Tripp yet after several minutes of Javier apologizing and trying to explain what happened, suddenly thanks Javier for his forgiveness. David, depending on how you respond to him in dialogue following the earlier flashback scene, will go from having a tender moment with Javier where he explains he is a soldier first and foremost, to explain why he is pretty much a rubbish husband to Kate and father to Gabe, then goes full on douche in order to set up the player choice moment to decide which outcome you will play for in the story. It just all feels so contrived and forced that it lacks any of the emotional response it wanted from me and as in previous episodes, falls flat.
So when it does finally come to making the decision to choose the ending, it was kind of a no brainer. Honestly the way, in which the narrative leading into this finale has drilled in that no matter what choices I made that there would always be a consequence, just made me pick the one I thought would get it over with the quickest but also an honest attempt to give Javier a sort of happy ending, if you can ever have one in a Walking Dead Series finale. Kate wants to fix Richmond City to make up for causing the breach leading to the final choice of helping her or choosing to leave the city to the Walkers and go find David and Gabe, who took it upon themselves to just go off on their own. Depending on which choice you made, you will quickly see the consequence of that, which in my case was discovering what happened to David and Gabe after helping Kate fix the breach. The pace of the episode is so fast that it hinders the impact of the consequence, leaving it only to be a truly uninspired bit of dialogue following one of the most lackluster QTE moments in a Telltale game I have played yet. The big moments, so hyped up by marketing leading into this finale were disappointing, undone by poor dialogue scenes and terribly executed moments that are just swept passed in order to get to the final moments of the story.
Those final moments, well all they really seem to do and something I had suspected ever since Clementine was introduced as a strange side character early on in this game , is set up the more than obvious continuation of Clem’s adventures in a new game. Her use throughout A New Frontier for me was completely wasted, showing up just to remind fans that she was still alive and using short flashback scenes to explain what happened to her after TWD Season 2 and to justify her presence in A New Frontier. Having a new lead character in Javier was a way to refresh the series by having a different viewpoint from brand new characters but sadly the now tired standard formula for The Walking Dead of ‘good guy survivors struggle to get by who then encounter a bad guy set of survivors leading to character deaths, betrayal and a final fight to survive’, completely nullified. Michonne, the mini series from last year, also suffered from this tired gameplay setup and A New Frontier simply flows into the same standard running order of events.
By trying to be too complex and clever, A New Frontier only ends up becoming a mediocre experience for a Telltale Game. Players of this series will now know the layout far too well for anything to really be a surprise anymore. Now with the prospect of yet another game with Clementine returning as the lead hero, I can only hope that Telltale are looking to bring this universe to an end because for me, it really has become a Walker of its own making and needs to be put to rest. With Telltale moving into doing comic book games with DC and MARVEL now, it has the potential of telling new stories that are engaging. I simply feel that The Walking Dead has now been overused, every device they have tried to use to refresh it has failed. Episodes are too short and lack any real epic moments now with characters who change their relationship position regardless of player choice and as with this finale, when the game is so obvious in trying to push the player to make a particular choice, the freedom of player choice becomes an illusion and ends up just being frustrating.
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is a collection of old ideas and gameplay mechanics getting reused just one time too many. It failed to refresh the series for me and is showing its age terribly now. I would like to see it put to bed finally, with the final moments of watching Clementine go off yet again on her own personal crusade, we might just get the final chapter to this universe, and that would actually give fans something to really get emotionally connected to if handled the right way.
