The Walking Dead: The Final Season - The Complete Season (Xbox One)

I went into The Final Season knowing Telltale's collapse was baked into its DNA, and honestly braced for a mess. What I got was a surprisingly coherent, emotionally charged send-off that manages to land the one thing the series always promised: making you feel the weight of every choice you make. Clementine is now a teenager shepherding a young child named AJ through a walker-infested world, and the writing leans hard into a mirror of the original Lee-and-Clem dynamic. You're not just surviving anymore. You're deciding what kind of person AJ grows up to be, and those decisions carry real moral texture. The setting, Ericson's Boarding School for Troubled Youth, gives the season a grounded home base full of kids who've learned to survive without adults. The internal politics of that group, who you trust, who gets a second chance, whether AJ witnesses an interrogation or gets shielded from it, are where the game is at its sharpest. The four episodes each clock in around two hours for the first three, with a slightly shorter finale, and pacing is consistently better than the uneven third season. The action sequences have been meaningfully expanded too: instead of pure quick-time events, there are stretches where Clem moves freely, using a knife to stun and finish walkers rather than just button-mashing through a scripted beat. It's a small upgrade, but it gives combat a little more agency than Telltale usually allowed itself. The weak spots are familiar if you've played any Telltale title before. Interaction outside of dialogue is thin, collectibles are largely decorative, and the engine carries its age visibly in stiff animations and occasional technical hiccups. The choice illusion, where your decisions feel momentous but the plot rails stay firmly in place, is still present. Long-time fans will recognize the scaffolding. And anyone coming in cold without playing seasons one and two will find the emotional payoff dramatically reduced. This is not a good entry point. It's a conclusion, and it earns that status by relying on seven years of accumulated attachment. What rescues it, especially the finale episode, is craft in the writing and performance. The parallels between Clementine-and-AJ and Lee-and-Clem are deliberate and occasionally a little on-the-nose, but the voice work from Melissa Hutchison grounds every scene. The closing sequence, where control quietly shifts from Clementine to AJ, is one of the more elegant structural choices in the series. The game understands what it's doing in those final twenty minutes in a way that earns the 95% positive rating it holds from over 21,000 Steam reviews. The Metacritic score of 77 feels closer to the truth for new players but undersells it for anyone emotionally invested. If you've never touched a Telltale Walking Dead game, start with Season One and come back here when you're done. If you bounced off the series after Season Three's rough patches, this one is worth returning for. It closes Clementine's arc with more care than the studio's circumstances had any right to produce.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on The Walking Dead: The Final Season - The Complete Season (Xbox One).