I hope you’re ready to hear about The Walking Dead: The Game for a long, long time. In the next few weeks, the title from developer Telltale Games will likely win many Game of the Year awards. Moving into 2013, people will reference the series over and over as the benchmark for story-telling in games. And historically, it will stand as the game that reinvented or at least repopularized adventure games.

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The first four episodes of The Walking Dead put that reputation and legacy in motion, and The Walking Dead: The Game – Episode 5: No Time Left cements it. The season finale of Lee Everett’s story is emotional, tense, exciting, terrifying and something everyone should experience if he or she wants to be part of the current gaming conversation from here on out.

Spoilers follow for Episodes 1 through 4, but are avoided for Episode 5.

“ Episode 5 is the emotional finale fans deserve.

Episode 5 picks up from and repeats the final moments of Episode 4: Around Every Corner. Clementine has been taken, Lee has been bitten, and the zombie horde is bearing down on Savannah. From there, Lee’s sole purpose is finding this girl, regardless of the cost.Whereas I complained that Episode 4 spun its wheels and never pushed the narrative forward, Episode 5 has no choice but to hurtle us through what seems to be Lee’s final hours, and we make more snap decisions than ever before. In previous installments, we’ve made one or two major decisions an episode, but Episode 5 has us making them left and right – deciding where the group should head, who to tell off, and so on.Truthfully, there are only a couple choices that drastically affect the flow of your story (one that’s super-early and super-gruesome), but Telltale does such a wonderful job of crafting its characters and story that telling the group who should do what feels epic and important even if the end result turns out the same no matter what.That’s why Episode 5 works so well; we know this is the end one way or another, and so does Lee. There’s no time to hem and haw about what to do – Lee’s on borrowed time and Clem is with a creepy dude. Make your decisions and go; Lee is more direct than ever, and you never know when one decision will be the last you’ll ever make for a character. The truly unexpected lies around every corner, and Telltale does an excellent job of playing with our pre-conceived notions as Walking Dead fans – teasing results we know but the character don’t.Gameplay-wise, this episode is what you’ve come to expect from the season. There aren’t difficult puzzles, and while there’s more action, there’s a healthy premium on talking. The framerate dropping in certain areas or the game stuttering before a scene change remain the only blemishes on a presentation front that includes fantastic voiceover work from the cast and some beautiful graphic novel-like art.And then there’s the largest zombie fight to date, an epic standoff, two great moments where the music swells, and a pair of one-on-one conversations you won’t forget and I refuse to spoil here. The Walking Dead: The Game – Episode 5: No Time Left is a perfectly paced finale to a story we’ve all been invested in from the get go. I cried in the final minutes, sat silently through the credits, and was speechless after the epilogue, but the true impact of the episode came the morning after I beat it. Walking on the sun-bathed streets of San Francisco, I found that I couldn’t get Clementine off my mind and a great melancholy off of my heart. I was sad to end up where I did, but happy to have taken this journey.