TWDS204 Review

Welcome back to my review of The Walking Dead: Season 2. So episode 3 was the lowest point of the season so far, but episode 4 is where it starts to feel like they're just making things up as they go along. Okay, I'm going to get this out there right now, I don't think this is the worst episode of the season. You'll hear my reasons why soon enough, but I can see why people hate it so much. I know a lot of you have been waiting for this, so let's just get right into episode 4, Amid the Ruins.

In the last episode Clementine and the new group of survivors she was traveling with got captured by a man they were on the run from and brought back to his compound. They formed a plan of escape and things didn't go so smoothly but they managed to go through with their plan anyway. However things also went badly during the actual escape part and Clementine was forced to either cut off Sarita's arm or kill the zombie that bit her.

This episode starts a bit differently depending on your choice. If you kill the zombie that bit Sarita then Kenny notices and helps Sarita get out of the herd. If you cut off Sarita's arm then the blood coming out of Sarita arm and her screaming draws walkers towards her and Kenny fights them off but don't want to leave Sarita behind. He's angry at Clementine for what she did but can be convinced to leave Sarita after finishing her off, or Clementine can finish off Sarita herself which just pisses off Kenny even more and Mike has to forcibly pull Kenny away in order to get him to leave. Either way, this leads to Clementine having to escape the herd on her own because Luke and Nick make a run for Sarah, and Bonnie, Rebecca and Jane are nowhere to be seen.

But Clementine's found by Rebecca pretty quickly and soon they bump into Jane who's reluctant to help at first but makes what she calls a "cow catcher" to help them get out of the herd. Out of the herd- Wait a second, how did they get so clean all of the sudden? And what happened to Clementine's facial scar? Anyway Rebecca feels that the baby's coming soon and she and Jane get into a bit of an argument over what she's going to do with it. Eventually they meet up with the group who also suddenly got clean and- wait what Clementine's facial scar is back? Ugh, whatever, the group's concerned about Kenny and haven't been able to talk to him. So of course, they once again ask for Clementine's help.

Clementine has some sort of talk with Kenny but he's too angry at Clementine to really want to talk at the moment. Which makes sense if she cut off Sarita's arm, but if she didn't this doesn't make sense. I'll get more into it later. The group discusses a plan of what to do but are worried about the others. Jane volunteers to look for them but asks that Clementine goes with her. Jane talks to Clementine about her sister and tries to convince her that the best way to go about things is to look out for herself and not trust others. Christ, anyway as they look for the others Jane teaches Clem some survival techniques and soon they hear Sarah screaming in the distance and approach where they hear the screaming coming from. If Nick survived episode 2 then he's found here stuck in a fence as a zombie. Poor Nick, getting killed off-screen.

Clementine and Jane find the trailer that Luke and Sarah are trapped in and find a way to distract the zombies long enough to get inside. Luke hasn't been able to get Sarah to move, but of course Clementine's here now so they use her to solve all their problems. They create a blockade but eventually have to use it as a means of escape, and Clementine has to choose whether or not she saves Sarah before leaving. Luke, Clem, Jane and Sarah if you saved her all return to the group and they that find Kenny's been sitting in a tent, and Rebecca's getting closer and closer to giving birth to the baby. They need help with the baby but even in this game there's no way in hell Clementine is helping with that shit, so she mentions Kenny and so of course they ask Clem to go talk to him.

There's a number of different ways this scene can play out but no matter what, Kenny will come out of the tent and tell the group everything they need for the baby birth. Mike and Bonnie go to a nearby museum and Jane checks out a nearby gift shop. You choose which one you want to go first and how the scene plays out is different depending on where you choose to go first. At the gift shop Clementine finds Jane sitting at a table thinking to herself and then they go up to the observation deck, and Jane tries to pick a lock to get a gate open where Rebecca can have the baby. Clem then spots someone approaching however, and they decide to hide and ambush him. His name's Arvo and he has a bag full of medicine that Rebecca could use during child birth, so Jane tries to convince Clementine that they should take it from him. Not that it matters, but I'll save that for later. Jane threatens Arvo as she sends him on his way and Luke comes to the gift shop, to see what's going on.

At the museum Clem finds a jacket that Rebecca can use as a substitute for a blanket, and Clem can see some water bottles behind a ticket booth. Clementine can choose to climb through the ticket booth to- Oh my God. Telltale, what the fuck where you thinking with this? This is- Oh Jesus Christ I really did not need to see that. Anyway... a zombie attacks and Mike just breaks the door down to help kill it. He also carries both gallons of water back to the camp. Well I guess Clementine can't do everything after all, this is one of the few times there's some semblance of realism to the story.

As they return to the campsite a herd of walkers sneaks up on the group, because Luke was supposed to be keeping watch but he's nowhere to be seen. So the group makes a run for the gift shop and climbs to the observation deck to find what's apparently Luke and Jane after they just had sex. But Rebecca's about to give birth and with the herd of walkers approaching, they need people to fight them off while Kenny helps Rebecca give birth to the baby. They attempt to fight back the zombies but there's too many of them so they try to block them with the cannon on the deck instead. But then the deck suddenly collapses and if Sarah's alive she gets caught underneath some of that and gets devoured by walkers.

Walkers begin climbing up the collapsed deck and the only way to stop them is to drop the rest of it, which of course Clementine takes care of. The baby is successfully born and at nightfall Jane leaves the group and offers Clementine the nailfile she used to unlock the gift shop. Luke is upset by Jane leaving and he and Kenny argue for a bit before debating on what they should do next, wait for a few days for Rebecca to recover or leave the next morning. Either way, after the group leaves they head for a nearby town but run into someone along the way, and it's Arvo. He seems to be alone at first but then his group comes out of hiding to surround and ambush Clementine's group, to rob and possibly kill them afterwards. Rebecca's too exhausted after her recent childbirth however, and quickly becomes a zombie that either Kenny or Clementine shoots which causes Arvo's group to start shooting at Clem's group. And that's how the episode ends. There isn't even preview for the next episode after this.

I mean wow, okay let's not get too ahead of ourselves here. Let's start with this first, I said in the last video that the option to cut off Sarita's arm did and didn't have changes in this episode. It has changes in that Sarita lives a little bit longer than if you cut it off in which case she dies right away. It doesn't have changes in that Kenny gets mad at Clementine for what she did either way. It makes sense for him to be angry if she cut off Sarita's arm since she is responsible for her death, but if she kills the zombie that bit Sarita, I don't get it. I mean you can see when Kenny spots her in the herd that he's not mad at Clementine at all so why is he suddenly mad at her now? It seems like they railroaded Kenny's character into acting the same way no matter what, even if it doesn't make sense, because they just couldn't be bothered to make him react differently to Sarita's death. Speaking of which, you can choose to kill Sarita yourself to stop her from becoming a zombie, and the way it happens makes it unintentionally funny. It's just so sudden and by the way, you're killing Kenny's girlfriend right in front of him! This has "bad idea" written all over it.  Well luckily for Clem all that happens is that Kenny yells at her, so it's not all bad.

At first I wondered why we were suddenly getting backstory on Jane but then I quickly realized that that was because she's a new character essentially. We didn't really learn anything about her in the previous episode, and it's only because Tavia said it that even know what her name is, so it makes sense for Jane to get character development now. But it seems that Telltale was maybe playing favorites with Jane because she gets character development but Mike and Bonnie don't despite having the same opportunity for it. I'll elaborate more on that later. Jane is basically a copy of Molly from season 1, down to having a dead sister, and I liked Molly, but Jane lacks Molly's positive qualities and she has Carver's survivalist mentality. It makes her character unappealing, but despite that I don't really dislike her, not even after what she did in episode 5. But that can wait until the next video, yes it certainly can.

The survival techniques Jane teaches Clem are neat but I feel two of them are unneeded. She shows Clem that going for a walkers legs to knock them down first is better than going straight for the head, but she already knocks them down first in previous episodes so this lesson comes off as redundant. Also if Nick survived episode 2 he's found as a zombie stuck in a fence, which I'll get more into later, and Clementine has to kill him to get him out of the way. The lesson here being that she has to be prepared for whenever she has to put down a friend or someone close to her if they get bit or become a zombie, but Clementine already had to deal with this if she shot Lee in season 1, and she even mentions that she had to do it before if that's the case so again, it comes off as redundant.

I like how there's an actual puzzle in this episode, it might be the only puzzle in the whole game now that I think about it. You have to figure out a way to distract the walkers so you can get to Luke and Sarah. It's your typical easy to figure out Telltale puzzle, but at least it actually is a puzzle unlike the shit that you had to do in episode 2. But there is a problem with what happens afterwards. At one point the sound of the car horn just stops and the zombie lying on it is gone. What happened to it? Did a wizard come by and cast a spell to make it disappear? It couldn't have slid off on it's own, you'd be able to see it on the ground there if it did. If that's what they intended they could've at least cut away from the scene real quick to show it. Instead it's just, it's there, and now it's gone.

And am I really supposed to believe that an 11 year old girl can kick open a door that a bunch of zombie couldn't break down by constantly banging on it? Clementine has already shown herself to be way more capable than someone her age should be throughout this season, but now it's getting ridiculous. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far. This series is supposed to have basis in reality, you know despite being about zombies, but there's no way in hell an 11 year old would be able to kick open a door that full grown adult zombies couldn't break down. This is another example of something happening for the sake of it happening, and we're not even at the worst of it yet.

The choice to leave Sarah to die is another example of Clementine acting out of character. Season 1 showed that Clem was never willing to leave people in the group behind, even if said people were a detriment to the group. So even if she didn't want to become friends with Sarah, Clementine still wouldn't leave her behind, she'd try to save her no matter what. Considering that she dies later on in the episode anyway, this choice should've been about how to save Sarah, rather than whether or not you do save her, or better yet, Clementine trying to save Sarah and your choices determine whether or not you succeed. That's what I thought they were going for with what you can tell Sarah to try to get her to move, but no, regardless of what you tell her, Sarah lives or dies depending on if you want to slap her to get her to move. Well slapping her feels good I guess so there's that at least.

One criticism of episode 4 that I'm actually going to rebuke, is that it focuses too much on Kenny, and that his arc is a rehash of what he went through in season 1. While you can say that his arc is a rehash, episode 4 isn't really all that focused on Kenny. There's really only two scenes that are solely about him, when Clementine tries to talk to him after the group escapes the herd, and when she tries to talk to him again in the tent. Between these two scenes, Kenny is entirely absent and after the tent scene, Kenny becomes more present in the episode but he isn't the main focus, and he doesn't even have that much dialogue until it's time to help Rebecca give birth to the baby. I actually kinda miss Kenny with how absent he is in this episode. The tent scene is probably one of the better scenes in the game. Kenny wasn't that  vocal about his suffering in season 1, he mostly tried to hide his feelings, so I think it's great that we actually get to hear how he feels for once. It shows his character depth, though like I said, it does feel very similar to what he went through in season 1. The tent scene can play out a number of different ways. You can either make Kenny more angry, have Kenny recognize how competent you are and thank you, or Kenny can apologize to you. Kenny apologizes if you stay silent the entire time he talks, and I'm honestly surprised Telltale included a unique response for this because usually when you pick the silent option in this game, the other characters just keep talking or otherwise don't act any differently than usual. I'm also surprised they included this because with how straightforward and frankly lazy this season is, I'm surprised Telltale would even bother including a unique response for playing a way most people wouldn't play. Of course they had to make Clementine swear again if you decide to be an asshole to Kenny instead, ugh, I think I said everything I needed to about that in my episode 2 review so I won't go into it again. There is another problem I have with the tent scene though, if Sarita survived the beginning of the episode then after the talk with Kenny, the camera shows Sarita's body over in a corner showing that he had to kill her either before or after she became a zombie. But if she died in the herd then the camera shows a puddle of blood that shouldn't even be there, and it might leave you wondering why it's even showing this.

I like how you're able to choose to go to either the museum or the observation deck first. It feels like something from The Wolf Among Us, another Telltale game that was being made at the same time as this one. Your arrival at either site plays out differently depending on where you go first, which gives this part of the episode a little bit of replayability. Clementine even makes a sarcastic comment if you go to the museum first, I like that it gives her a bit of personality which she severely lacks in Season 2. While I'm talking about this I might as well mention that episode 4 is a big improvement over the last one in terms of actual gameplay. There's a hell of a lot more of it than in episode 3. The hubs are a lot better than previously, though still not on the level of quality of season 1, this episode feels like an episode of season 1 in terms of how it evenly breaks up between dialogue choices, QTEs, and hubs. It once again feels like I'm playing a game rather than watching a movie. But like I said, the hubs are not on the same level of quality as season 1. When I said earlier that Jane gets character development but Mike and Bonnie don't, it wasn't just because Jane has a talk with Clem, it's also because the hub on the observation deck gives us a dialogue tree where we can have a number of conversations with Jane, like in season 1, but the hub in the museum doesn't do the same for Bonnie and Mike. This was easily the best time to give these two some character development, maybe have Clementine ask Mike what happened to his ear seeing as how he's not the bandit from the forest like originally intended, and have Bonnie tell Clementine about her past maybe even what happened in 400 Days. The closest we get to a 400 Days reference is Bonnie mentioning that she has "old scars" if you don't climb through the ticket booth, that's it.

I didn't mention this before so I might as well bring it up now, like how I'm sure a lot of people feel, I'm not too happy about how Nick and Sarah's deaths were handled. Nick gets an unceremonious off-screen death so we don't even know the conditions of how he died, and Sarah dies even if you save her in the trailer park. It feels like they were killed off because the writers didn't know what to do with their characters. Speaking of which, like in the last episode, the writers were once again changed for this episode. This episode was written J. T. Petty, somebody who doesn't even work for Telltale, and Eric Stirpe who only worked on Tales from the Borderlands before this. Now I don't really think that lack of experience contributes to how this episode was written so much as the project once again being handed to people who weren't initially on it, and thus having no grasp on what was originally planned for the season. This is the episode where you can tell that they were just making it up as they went along, aside from Nick and Sarah getting killed off after doing nothing of any importance, the music for the title screen of this episode changed sometime before the episode was released or when it was released, I can't remember exactly when. But my point is, the original music for the episode's title screen implied that the episode was originally darker than what we got. Not to mention that Clementine is rubbing blood on her face in the title card and among the people in the background it appears to be Eddie, another character from 400 Days.

But I'm getting a little off-topic here, let's go back to the character deaths. Nick's death, aside from being unceremonious, is barely reacted to by anyone. It might be understandable for Clementine to not really be all that sad that he died since she didn't really know him for that long, but Luke is supposed to be Nick's best friend and not even he's too broken up by Nick's death. Hell Rebecca seems to care more about the fact that Nick died than Luke does. Then of course there's the issue of Sarah's death. Sarah dying no matter what is already pretty shitty, but the way she dies later in the episode is one of the most forced deaths in the entire season. Luke and Clem push the cannon to block the walkers and suddenly the deck collapses trapping Sarah underneath it, and you can tell Jane to try to save Sarah but she doesn't even try. Once she gets hit on the head by a piece of debris she runs away like "welp, I got hit in the head, guess that means I can't save Sarah anymore". The deck shouldn't have even collapsed because it was obviously built to hold the cannon's weight, as well as the weight of everyone who'd be walking around on it, and it was built before the apocalypse happened which means there'd normally be more people than what's on the deck at that moment walking around on it, so there was no reason for the deck to break here. It just happens for the sake of happening because Sarah needs to die no matter what. It feels like they forced Sarah's death to happen just so they could "prove" Jane right about her Darwinistic mentality. Why couldn't Sarah stay inside the gift shop with Kenny and Rebecca? There was no reason for her to be out on the deck in the first place. And by the way, isn't it great that I taught Sarah how to shoot back in episode 2? Yeah that really came in handy here now didn't it? Seriously this was the perfect opportunity to have that choice have an impact. Sarah could've at least helped out with fighting the zombies before she died. And then after all that's over and done with and the baby's been born, everybody completely forgets about Sarah, and it's all about the baby now. It's like she wasn't even there in the first place.

I think the reason Sarah dies no matter what and why her death is so forced is because of how many people in the fanbase didn't like her. That may also be the reason why Rebecca dies almost immediately after giving birth. Her becoming a zombie gives people who didn't like because of how she treated Clementine in episode one, a chance to finally kill her. Of course by this point it's too late to get any satisfaction from killing Rebecca because she's already warmed up to Clementine and started being nicer to her, and the context of her death makes it impossible to feel good about killing her regardless. Rebecca doesn't really get any character development this episode but she does have some sort of arc here, being that this episode is pretty much all about how she's giving birth to the baby very soon and the group has to gather supplies and prepare for it. If this was the point in which Rebecca warmed up to Clementine and started to trust her, it would've felt way more natural than it suddenly happening as soon as episode 2. But did anybody else find it weird that Clementine doesn't mention Christa in this episode? I mean she was pregnant too and Clementine had to deal with this situation before, so why was Christa not mentioned here? There isn't even an optional dialogue choice that allows us to mention Christa. It seems like Telltale wants to avoid the mystery of what happened to Christa's baby as much as possible.

Okay, there's one thing I haven't mentioned yet about this episode, and I think it's time I stop ignoring the elephant in the room and talk about this. As you already know if you've played this episode before, the choice of whether or not you should rob Arvo is completely meaningless. Even if you choose not to take Arvo's medicine, he still has his group come after you to rob, and possibly kill you all. Telltale Games: Your choices matter. I mean, what else can I say about this? This is pretty much just like the stranger back in season 1, but at least back then, he recognized if you didn't agree with the group's decision to steal from the car. Here Arvo still blames Clementine for stealing the medicine even if you don't take it, so he's basically lying to his group to get them to rob you. And if you want to say, that he was in fact robbed because Jane took his pistol, in that case there was no reason for the choice to rob him in the first place, because it happens anyway. Listen Telltale, I know you guys want to sell your games on the premise that "your choice matter" but if the choices don't change anything, don't give us a choice to begin with.

Alright I think it's time I explain myself on why I don't think this episode is as bad as most people think it is. I want to say first that I do understand why people hate this episode so much. It's the most blatant Season 2 has gotten so far with how much your choices don't matter, and it's the point where Telltale got so lazy with determinant characters that they couldn't even keep them alive beyond the episode where they became determinant. But to be perfectly honest here fam, despite all of that I really like how this episode is designed from a gameplay perspective. Like I said earlier it feels like Season 1 with how it breaks up evenly between the three styles of gameplay modern Telltale games have. And even though it is mostly from Jane, there is still technically more character development here than the previous two episodes. I still wouldn't call it a "good" episode given how it is an episode of The Walking Dead: Season 2, and reviewing it has worsened my opinion on it, but I still think it's at least better than episodes 2 and 3. But that's just me.

Finally, let's talk briefly about the ending of the episode. Arvo has his group ambush yours and the two groups go into a standoff then suddenly Rebecca dies and becomes a zombie. Clementine can either shoot the zombie Rebecca or call for help in which case Kenny takes action and shoots her, causing the Russians to start shooting either way. What was Telltale thinking with this? The scene is tense and suspenseful, but the way it plays out is hopeless as fuck. There's no way this can end well for anyone involved. There isn't even a "next time on" segment giving us a preview of what to expect in the next episode. How does the season even continue after an episode ends like this? Well, we'll find out in the next video, when I look at the final episode of Season 2, No Going Back. Clem help me. Thank you all for watching, see you in the next video.