Clementine has spent years walking the road, carrying AJ across a world full of dead bodies and people who want to hurt her. Now she has found a place that might finally be a home. But that home comes with a price, and The Walking Dead: The Final Season makes you pay it in the choices you make.
The game, developed by Telltale Games and later taken over by Skybound Games, closes out the story of Clementine, the girl whose fate has defined this series since its first season. It spans four episodes, running from August 2018 to March 2019, and brings Clementine back to West Virginia, where she and AJ join a group of troubled teenagers living in the ruins of a former boarding school. The game was aimed to return to themes and elements from the first season, meant to be the final chapter of Clementine’s story.
Trailer, via Telltale Games.
The Setup
The season picks up years after the events of A New Frontier, with Clementine having raised AJ, the son of Rebecca, since rescuing him from McCarroll Ranch. The school offers safety, shelter and a small community, but it also brings new dangers. A raider group called the Delta, led by a figure from Clementine’s past, wants what the school holds. Inside the school, Clementine faces a leader named Marlon who will betray her to keep the peace with the raiders.
The cast is large and dense, and the game expects you to keep track of who stands with whom:
- Marlon, the leader Clementine must eventually remove.
- Brody, the resident who exposes Marlon’s deal with the raiders.
- Abel, the raider who tries to rob Clementine and AJ.
- Minerva, one of Tenn’s older sisters and Violet’s ex-girlfriend, who is also a member of the Delta.
- Lilly, a former member of Clementine’s old group from Macon, Georgia from the first season.
The game leans on these characters to build tension rather than simply fill space, and the writing asks you to weigh loyalty against survival constantly.
The Choices That Matter
The Final Season runs on the same conversation tree system as earlier entries, letting you guide how Clementine answers, reacts and acts in every scene. Your answers shape how other characters see you, and some decisions open paths while closing others entirely. The game also introduces a collectible system, where you can find items scattered through the world and place them in your room later. Some of those items can only be found based on choices you made earlier, which means replaying the season with different answers changes what you see and what you earn.
The game can import choices from previous Telltale seasons, so players who have followed Clementine’s story since the beginning get their past decisions carried forward. For newcomers or players who want to start fresh, a web-based Story Builder tool lets you build a new save from scratch, adjusting any choices that affect Clementine’s character along the way.
What Works
The writing stays strong in places. The scenes between Clementine and AJ carry real weight, showing a mother and child working through fear, loss and hope in equal measure. The flashbacks to Lee Everett, her past guardian, give the present story a sense of purpose, tying Clementine’s current actions to lessons learned years earlier. The cast of teenagers gives the school scenes a lived-in feel, and the betrayal at the center of the plot lands hard because you have spent hours building trust with the people around you.
The quick time events, used in action scenes like escaping a walker, can break the pacing at times, but they are rarely the focus. The game is built around talking, waiting and watching, and that structure suits the story’s emotional demands.
What Falls Short
The pacing suffers in the middle episodes. Some stretches drag, with conversations and fetch quests that feel like filler rather than character development. The quick time events can also feel cheap, especially when they interrupt a tense moment with a simple button press sequence. The game’s reliance on conversation trees means the story can repeat itself, and the choices available sometimes feel limited compared to what the setup suggests.
Where It Lands
The Walking Dead: The Final Season is a fitting, if imperfect, close to Clementine’s story. Its strongest moments are the quiet ones, the conversations between Clementine and AJ, and the scenes where the game forces you to choose who lives and who dies. The writing is sharp, the cast is well-drawn, and the choices carry real weight. But the pacing drags in the middle, and the ending does not fully land.
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