Reviewed on PC in 4K.

Saying goodbye is hard. Take Us Back, Episode Four of The Walking Dead: The Final Season, isn’t just the end of Clementine’s story. It’s Telltale Games’ swan song, and its release comes at a time when their brand of story games is scarce on the ground. The first season of TWD, released in 2012, convinced me that games could be art, and started me down the path of games journalism. If these games were never released, I don’t know where I would be now. I’ve never written, “This game is great!” while feeling so heavy hearted. But it is and I am.

If you never liked story games, the last mile of this long and winding narrative won’t do anything to convince you. But if you love these sorts of games, this is a fitting end to Clem’s story. The writing, art direction, and voice acting remain some of the best in the business, even if that business is gone now.

I want to give a particular shoutout to the animators. This is the most beautiful TWD season yet, and a lot of it is due to the performances they created for Clementine, AJ, and the rest of the cast. Every loaded blink, every grimace of pain, every moment of grief-stricken silence looked and felt real.

Studios spending millions of dollars on motion capture would do well to save their money and hire the TWD animation team instead. Clementine and AJ are better than a million hours of performers trying to act through mocap gimp suits.

The episode feels a little short, and I wonder if that’s due to the fact that Skybound Games had to dig this episode out of the rubble of Telltale. Episode Three was almost done when TTG collapsed, but as far as I understand it, this episode wasn’t too far along yet. Length-wise, it feels more like a denouement than a climax. Then again, maybe it feels short because I want to spend just a little more time with Clementine and her friends. And its short length didn’t detract from its emotional power.

Now let’s get into spoilers.

In one of the final scenes, Clementine is bitten, and you have the option to choose between asking AJ to kill you or leave you. I chose “kill me” and through tears, the axe goes up and comes down again.

George Romero’s seminal film, Night of the Living Dead, marked the birth of modern American zombie media. Spoilers for a 50-year old film: a vigilante mob kills the black protagonist long after the danger has passed. We watch this man fight for survival for a harrowing 90 minutes only for him to be gunned down by human beings to whom he posed no threat. Romero’s grim ending can be read as a statement about race in America, and how the marginalized suffer when society descends into crisis.

While Romero’s work remained thoughtful throughout his long career, much of zombie media has shambled down the frustrating and repetitive thematic path of mere survivalism, where empathy, kindness, and trust are portrayed as traits possessed by characters who are too dumb to live. Less imaginative creators have failed to use the zombie metaphor to examine larger themes, and have sometimes reduced zombie media to a logistical exercise in counting bullets and trusting no one - in essence, becoming nothing more than the walking dead.

But TWD’s writers leave us with two insistent and powerful messages: never lose hope and don’t always do what you’re told. TWD is a game series that strived to provide difficult binary choices. Save Carley or Doug. Steal the food or leave it behind. Kill the cannibal dairy farmer or show him mercy.

When Minnie tries to lure Tennessee to his death on the bridge, she personifies the violence of hopelessness. She has lost hope, so she chooses to drag her former friends and loved ones down with her. Her siren song leads the undead, a physical manifestation of submission to tragedy. She almost succeeds, and as a result of her efforts, Clem is bitten by a walker.

“Kill your loved one” or “leave them to turn” became TWD’s defining choice after Lee Everett’s death in Season 1. But AJ didn’t live through that. He refuses to let this hideous choice imprison him. Instead, AJ cuts off Clem’s leg and saves her life.

There is a third way, in games and in life, owned and practiced by the youthful who are still finding their feet in the world: the way that chooses life and risk and love in the face of annihilation and hopelessness. Less ambitious zombie stories portray this as naive, but it’s not. Defiant and beautiful, this choice always exists outside of the presented binary.

During the best moments of the TWD series, we are placed in the role of parent. As Lee, we parent Clem. As Clem, we parent AJ. We tried to make the best decisions we could, knowing that someone else was watching and learning. We were more than just survivors - we were teachers, protectors, fathers and mothers. And taking on these roles insists on hope, demands a future. The writers presented us with these hard choices, but in the end, the hardest choice is the one to keep living in the face of tragedy.

The writers know that, and refuse despair by not closing the circle of loss that started with Lee’s death. They knew that we were watching and learning as well, and refused to leave us with a message of nihilism and hopelessness that has consumed much of zombie and other horror media.

That team is gone now, scattered to the winds, and the company that began this story so many years ago has shut its doors. But they refused to let their final story transform us into one of the walking dead.

Like every parent, they’ve done all they could do, and now we have to choose.

I listened. I’m ready.