Learning About Us

Throughout Telltale’s entire game library, The Walking Dead stands out as one of the most emotionally potent and thematically coherent games the company has made. The game sets out to question the strength of society’s morals amongst the ruins of civilization, and does so by forcing the player to continually make tough decisions throughout the game.

However, every decision in the game has real emotional weight because of the character of Clementine. Clementine is a girl you stumbled upon in the first few minutes of the game, and because she can’t protect herself, you vow to protect her.

Clementine is young, impressionable, and holds on to the childhood innocence she was taught to have. She doesn’t yet fully understand morality or the difference between right and wrong and it is in the world of a zombie apocalypse that you are tasked with teaching her these concepts.

Clementine is what makes the game difficult and what makes the decisions you have to make matter.

While it is justifiable in this world to forsake others in favor of personal survival, what the game really wants to ask is whether teaching that behavior to a child is acceptable. It wants to ask how closely we hold the normal conventions and morals of society to ourselves.

In this respect, The Walking Dead stands as a game that can truly be used to learn about ourselves as a self discovery tool. Because Clementine functions as an emotional through-line for the game, you’re forced to look at yourself with every decision you make, hoping that your example that you set for Clementine is enough.

This is why the ending of the game is so potent. At the end of the game, one way or another, you leave Clementine, and all you’re left with is hope that she’ll be alright. By having every decision you make in the game effect Clementine, the ending feels like a culmination of everything you done so far, leaving you with nothing else but your thoughts about yourself.

When done right, games show us aspects of ourselves that we previously could have never seen, and The Walking Dead is a perfect example of a game that does just that.