The Walking Dead: Season Two Episode 1 - All That Remains

The stuttering and freezing issues that have always plagued the console versions are entirely absent from the Steam game, and the game looks gorgeous at a crisp 1080p – its expressive faces and soft colours doing wonders to mask a presumably modest budget.

The story is compelling, the gameplay engaging, and the experience of playing is riveting.

Episode one not only reintroduces us to the world of The Walking Dead, it raises the stakes in such a way that Clementine’s situation is more perilous than ever. We weren’t convinced that season two could eclipse season one, but at least in a few ways, it already has.

This episode truly begins to set in place Clementine’s lost innocence.

The action sequences in the premiere episode are well-paced and fraught with tension. They're streamlined from the first season's experiments, offering a mix of timed clicks, button mashes and swipes, alongside a frantic search for the right weapon in the surrounding area.

All That Remains has quickly put to bed any worries I had that TellTale would be unable to pull off the same stunt twice. Written with a maturity, intelligence, and above all, restraint, the season opener packs its punches with frighteningly effective precision, and delivers exactly the kind of memorable, beautifully distressing content fans of the first series will have come to expect.

Despite its flaws, The Walking Dead: season 2: Episode 1 is still an outstanding game. It still makes you feel for its characters in ways no other game on the market does. It’s still one of the best examples of games as art our industry has to offer.

We won’t know for sure just how effective the set-up here was until the full season is complete sometime next year, but as it stands right now, we’re totally on board.

It’s important to remember that this is the first episode of a new story arc, and as such, its main purpose is to introduce the new characters and set the scene for what’s to come. And it does a fantastic job with that - especially with one hell of a cliffhanger at the end.

If you liked Season 1, give Telltale more of your money.

A gripping opener that suggests TWD will zombie-dodge tricky second season syndrome. [March 2014, p.75]

TellTale has been using and refining the same engine over multiple games and there are still some really awful bugs. Not game breaking by any means, but when non-interactive character models appear, stock still, in the middle of a room it breaks my focus on the story

Keeps you on your toes from the first to the last second of a 1.5 hour long playthrough, as usually forcing you to make tough decisions under pressure and dwell on them later. [02/2014, p.57]

Taken on its own, “All That Remains” is somewhat problematic, but its flaws are easy to look past if you remember that it is only the first of five episodes.

All That Remains is short, roughly two hours long. Yet Telltale Games has done a good job in setting up future episodes by asking tantalizing questions about its plot and cast.

A great new beginning for The Walking Dead, with some new and interesting themes and the great writing we have learned to expect from it. The refinements to graphics and interface are welcome, but bugs and technical problems are almost all still there.

If you thought the second season of The Walking Dead was going to be more lighthearted, then prepare to be disappointed. All That Remains sees a more mature Clementine battling to survive by herself. As first episodes go, this one definitely gets the job done. The hard part is waiting for the second episode.

All That Remains delivers by providing answers to lingering questions from season one and setting up new obstacles for Clementine to face. My biggest reservation is that it features many similarities to the first season; I have to wonder how many zombie fights and new camps of people I can find before they all blend together.

Overall I really enjoyed stepping back into the world Telltale carved out for the franchise, and I’m looking forward to continuing my journey with Clementine and the new cast. Time will tell how significant the actions from Season 1 will actually be, but right now they feel more like window dressing than anything important.

Quotation forthcoming.

Impossible to judge in isolation, but definitely a good start. [March 2014, p.73]

We were wishing for something a little bit different but in the end, Telltale did good by sticking to their guns – because this looks like another hell of a ride. [Issue#238]

This emotional rollercoaster really had me on the edge of my seat.

Telltale start the new Walking Dead season with a bang, delivering a tense and gripping episode that thrusts a familiar face into new desperation and dangers.

All That Remains is a raw telling drenched with cinematography intricacies. The action and tension are held back, but in this chapter emotions play a bigger role. Playing as Clementine you'll feel at a loss for direction and abandoned, but also ready for everything.

First episodes are always going to be hard to evaluate to see where the season is going to go, but as an opening episode for Season Two of The Walking Dead, I feel that it gives a strong first impression.

Same strong characters and plotting that made Season 1 so powerful.

Dedicated fans who want to know what happened to Clementine (Read: everyone who played the first game) will not be wasting their time with episode one.

Utterly brutal, The Walking Dead is back with multiple bangs. Telltale emotionally batter us over the head repeatedly, telling us to forget things that matter to us in real life.

Season One's highlights are long ago, nevertheless "All that remains" is a great debut for Season Two. Clem is a strong character and Telltale hasn't lost its writing skills. But we are waiting for the subsequent episodes to understand if this season can live up to the great expectations everyone has.

All That Remains does a very good job with several breathtaking and shocking moments. The problem is that once you've seen the man who moves the levers behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz of the Video Games is not so surprising.

The Walking Dead is back with the same identity the first season gave us. It sets the solid foundations of this season, and leaves us waiting for what could be another unique experience.

A strong return for The Walking Dead, and proves that Clementine was a fantastic choice for this season's protagonist.

All That Remains is a fine way to kick off the second season of The Walking Dead. Telltale made some interesting design decisions putting players in the role of Clementine, and most of their choices—but not all—work out nicely.

The new cast may not be as memorable as the folks in the initial offering, but they're welcome additions, all with their own unique personalities. I particularly like this choice because it sets up future episodes, and your first impressions will no doubt come back to help or bite you later.

All That Remains does a great job of reintroducing the series, and switches things up in a way that could have tripped up harder than Lee over a tree branch yet feels like the only way the story could have been continued.

Season 2’s premiere of The Walking Dead is predictable in good and bad ways — its character drama is strong, its technical prowess is not.

The opening episode is more brutal than ever and does a great job introducing Clementine as the main character, but it falls short when it come to innovation and compelling adventuring.

It may not be the best episode of The Walking Dead, but it still has some good moments in it. Hopefully the glitches will be worked on and the setups established will have some payoffs. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead and enjoyed what you played of the first season, chances are you need to pick this episode up. Just keep in mind; it may not be as polished as the previous outings.

All That Remains sets the stage for some great character development for Clementine, but there's not much payoff in this 90 minute episode.

The second season of The Walking Dead follows in the footsteps of the first, presenting a quite evanescent gameplay and a plot that can only be assessed over time, but for now with a good impact on the fans.

The focus on action for the first half of the episode takes away from what makes this series great, but the exceptional tone, and excellent storytelling still deliver. Clementine promises to be a unique and compelling protagonist, and Telltale has the potential here to make the most important game in the zombie sub-genre.

Cliffhanger endings are fine when the next episode of a TV show is days away, but less so when the wait is likely to last a couple of months. Yet Telltale has already achieved something remarkable, proving – to both Clem and to you – that there’s life after Lee.

It was perhaps too much to ask of Telltale that they blow our minds in the very first episode, but I still feel a little let-down with how “setty-uppy” All That Remains felt, with a mostly predictable storyline and few really significant or interesting choices to make.

The second season started slowly, and out of its nature The Walking Dead franchise is not able to repeat its huge craze in the past year. Starring the young Clementine is like a promise of brand-new experience, but otherwise it's all the same as before, and with the same problems rolling in. In any case, the most important thing remains - it has a great story.

It’s far too early to crown this season as a successful follow-up to Telltale’s first foray with The Walking Dead, but there are enough threads of character intrigue to suggest that Clementine and her new crew have a promising (that is to say, heartbreaking and terrible) future.

If you liked and enjoyed the first season and you don't mind repeating, play the second one, because, as for now, it's exactly more of the same.

As of right now, all on its own, "All That Remains" is an entertaining piece of interactive fiction that will have to do a lot of heavy lifting to live up to its forebear.

For a game that is almost devoid of gameplay by concept, a boring story is a like a death sentence. Three hours of Clementine’s misadventures boil down to ‘Well, try not to die, okay?”

A script that is not as elegant as the first season and one fears that, through hubris or complacency, Telltale has lost sight of what made The Walking Dead so good in the first place.

Ultimately, the only real sin committed by All That Remains is that it's a first episode to the second season rather than a sixth episode to the first season.

The story is too loose and doesn’t display a proper direction just yet. It’s not all bad as there is a rather striking moment halfway through the story, but if this is truly all that remains, then we’re in for a rough season.

Not a bad start to the second season but not a great one either, with a formless plot and unusually weak characterisation.