Episode 1:
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is the newest edition of Telltale’s game series based on The Walking Dead TV show and comic. A New Frontier represents an access point for beginners to the series. Like the rest of the series, A New Frontier is a narrative game where the story changes based on the choices you make throughout. All actions and choices are made through deceptively simple quick time events and dialogue trees. This gameplay style is relatively unchanged from the original game. The main difference here is that the style is more sleek and minimalist.
While the story is designed to be friendly to new users, players familiar to the franchise will feel a special attachment to several characters that appear in the first episode, especially with the ability to load their save from the previous games into A New Frontier. While designed for players not intimately familiar with the series, A New Frontier is not particularly friendly for players completely unfamiliar with the Walking Dead franchise. Some key concepts are not explained at all, and the story takes a large leap forward from the beginning of the zombie outbreak to the middle of the apocalypse, without the explanation that would help players new to the series. In the game you play as Javi, a disgraced pro baseball player taking care of his brother’s wife and their children as they try to stay ahead of the zombies in a van. The characters and writing in Telltale’s games usually take the spotlight and this game is no different, containing stellar writing and storytelling. Episode 1 focuses on Javi and his family, ending with a dramatic cliffhanger that grabs and holds your interest.
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Episode 2:
In the second episode of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier, the story focusses on Javi and Clementine as they seek to ensure the safety of one of the members of their group. Character wise, this is where previous knowledge of the series becomes less important, as players begin to learn about Clementine through flashbacks. Flashbacks are the name of the game in the second episode; both Javi and Clementine have elements of their backstories and their relationships with other characters illuminated in detail.
As well as getting to know the central characters, the second episode introduces players to a variety of new and unique characters with deep, troubling relationships with Javi and Clementine. These messy relationship dynamics lead to many interesting and complex choices throughout the episode. The writing in this episode was really a step above, even by Telltale’s high standards. Every character involved had clear motivations and genuine, earned conflict that was satisfying from start to finish. At times the gameplay was genuinely difficult and troubling. The puzzles in this episode do suffer, however. There is one main puzzle which is solved just by walking around and clicking on everything until something eventually works.
Even with this small gripe, this episode is the better one by virtue of its writing alone. When taken together, these episodes are more than enough to make players want to play the original Walking Dead series to get an idea of the back story and to occupy their time until episode 3.
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