Review for The Walking Dead: The Final Season. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 14/08/2018
After several months of limbo, the story of The Walking Dead: The Final Season has finally taken its well-deserved twist: now in the hands of Skybound Entertainment, the third and penultimate episode saw the light on January 15th of the year just started.
The story proceeds from where it left off and only the disappearance of the Telltale Games logo from the opening credits and the deactivation of website links from the main menu indicate that something big has changed, beneath a seemingly calm surface.
"Broken Toys", the third episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season, maintains a average duration of two hours in line with that of the previous chapters and presents a crucial point for the events of Clementine, AJ and their new quasi-friends. The choices made in the past influence dialogues and situations in an important way, without however the current of the main events being concretely conditioned by them.
The penultimate episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season is in fact the one that, even more than its predecessors, pushes the player in a predetermined direction, without actually leaving the possibility to “shape events according to one's own choices” as indicated at the beginning of each graphic adventure from Telltale; the only, full-bodied narrative crossroads seems to manifest itself at the end of the episode, but to understand the actual importance of that decision it will be necessary to wait for the March 26, release date of the last segment of the story.
Even with an unscheduled handover, The Walking Dead: The Final Season maintains the same graphic and stylistic style to which Telltale has accustomed its audience over the years: the settings shown are accurate, both for details and for the management of the lights and it is only technically that the software shows its side to criticism, due to less convincing animations (especially facial) and some drop in framerate more than in the first two episodes of the season, perhaps due to a non-optimized development of the content.
With "Broken Toys", The Walking Dead: The Final Season continues the parallelism with Barrie's Peter Pan: after a bloody clash for both sides, Clementine and the few survivors will try to free the "lost children" prisoners from the "pirate ship", whose "Captain Hook" has now consolidated the friction with the protagonist, whom he sees as the incarnation of the past lost and mirror of the monster he has become.
Extremely interesting is the management of the character of AJ, who now plays a key role in the events and is precisely the hinge around which Clementine's story and life revolve, which has now accepted the role of protector and mentor of the child, with all the responsibilities that go with it. The choices of the young woman have already had a strong impact on AJ's behavior in the past and "Broken Toys" seems to have taken a safe path in this direction: like Lee before her, Clementine will have to accept firsthand the consequences of what AJ could become , if present in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Both the protagonists and the supporting actors of The Walking Dead: The Final Season have now taken on good depth and consistency in their behavior, an increasingly rare condition in the latest Telltale products and for this reason the player is able to empathize more easily with them and let himself be carried away by the current of emotions in case something happens to them: given the structural limits of the project, the development problems and the need to close a narrative arc, the decision of could prove wise focus more on quality than on the quantity of choices offered.
Instead, the localization is mediocre, qualitatively much lower than in previous episodes, with inaccurate translations and subtitles often completely different from speech, with even whole sentences more or less.
Excluding some narrative forcing (in any case you have always been more or less present since the first season) and some events triggered by violent reactions, excessive even for a post-apocalyptic context, The Walking Dead: The Final Season seems to have chosen the right direction to conclude in way worth the story of Clementine. The perplexity remains about how a single episode can succeed in the enterprise, but after the failure of Telltale and the near abandonment of the project, the qualitative result achieved by "Rotti Toys" should give the fans of the videogame series hope, thanks also to the different months of Skybound's time to do a good closing job.
► The Walking Dead: The Final Season is an Adventure-Point & Click game developed and published by Telltale Games for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 14/08/2018
