SPOILERS: if you aren’t up to date, turn back now.
After seemingly splitting the fanbase down the middle, it all comes down to this for the third season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Its season finale, which admittedly feels slightly premature, may not please those who are crowing for more Clementine, but for anyone who’s invested time into the travails of a disgraced baseball player and his ragtag family, From the Gallows sends the season out on a solid note.
Solid, but not spectacular.
As has been the case throughout the season (and pretty much every Telltale game you can think of), some of its narrative threads don’t tie together properly and will likely leave you wanting more. That could be taken one of two ways: either Telltale have done a good enough job to entice players back for a fourth go-around of misery, or they’ve left them frustrated.
I’m somewhere in the middle. While From the Gallows offers pulse-pounding action and high stakes, it misses some emotional beats, or even forgets to aim for them to begin with. Secondary characters will die without much reflection and character motivations go missing alarmingly often. This is understandable given the fact that choices actually mean something this time around, so it can’t have been easy to find an even tone with such differing outcomes. As an aside, From the Gallows performs impeccably, making it easier to forgive the blips found in episode four. There were no prominent glitches in my playthrough to speak of, so kudos to Telltale on that front.
Instead of immediately picking things up after the events of the last episode, the season finale instead decides to borrow a storytelling trait from its TV cousin. A flashback sees Javi, David, and their father sitting around a table and playing a game. While this might make some groan, this gentle bump down in tempo proves that A New Frontier excels in its quieter moments, which is helped by some rather astute writing. The patriarch reels off words of wisdom like a caffeinated greetings card writer without ever seeming as hacky. He’s a tertiary (and dead) character, but the short scene does enough to show his influences on his two sons and also their obvious differences.
The dynamics in the Garcia family are what’s made the season so easy to return to, even if the pace of A New Frontier has been unsteady. It all comes to a head in From the Gallows with player decisions being as terminally important as they have ever been. People will live or die based on your choices, but Telltale have done a quietly excellent job of making earlier, less important decisions reverberate through later episodes.
When the action returns to the present, Javi and David find Kate alive and well (despite the misleading poster for the episode). The trio then find the rest of the group and run to relative safety before a plan to escape Richmond is hatched. But not before some wild personality changes from David, who goes from redemptive to violent to redemptive to violent to redemptive to– he changes a lot, is what I’m saying. Just when the game threatens to make you like him, he does something stupid for the sake of pushing the drama forward.
And that’s an unwelcome trait of a lot of Telltale’s brand of storytelling: characters pushed into dumb actions to provide the drama. When Telltale can keep things consistent, the stories they weave are some of the best in the business. However, as evidenced by David’s maddening character topsy-turvy, there needs to be a better solution to provide conflict than what they lean on.
If you’ve played a Telltale game before, you know that there’s going to be a heart-wrenching decision to make come the end of a season. The choices provided don’t match those seen in season one or two, but they’re still going to leave you sat back in your chair for a good few minutes as the credits roll. It’s a well-worn tradition -coercing the player into an almost impossible choice- but when it’s this effective, there’s no need to change the rulebook.
By its end, From the Gallows is likely to have left an impression; the final verdict delivered on whether the Garcia experiment was worth it or not. While it wasn’t perfect, A New Frontier’s almost brave character shift and absorbing familial drama means it’s a worthy addition to Telltale’s roster. If its season finale had found more of an even tone, perhaps it would have been easier to look back on the season as a whole as an unquestionable success.
Episode 4 REVIEW
Episode 3 REVIEW
Episode 2 REVIEW
Episode 1 REVIEW
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