Now Playing: A New Frontier

A New Frontier is the third season of the Telltale Games Walking Dead series. It begins, thankfully, with the option to build a custom ‘choice’ backstory for Clementine based upon the key decisions of Seasons 1 and 2. I found this particularly useful considering I last played Season 2 in 2014 and no longer have my original save files. What surprised me though, once I actually started the game, is that you don’t (outside of a few flashback scenes) play as Clementine, but as a new character – Javier.

I guess that’s my fault for not actually reading the game description before I picked it up in the recent Steam Summer Sale. It was a surprise then, but I wouldn’t say a disappointing one – by the end of the game, I’d quite enjoyed my time with Javier, and I liked the way Clementine factored into his story, her character and your interactions with her shaped by those key choices in the previous games.

It does feel a little cheap, however, considering how varied the endings of Season 2 could be. A New Frontier does take those endings into consideration and presents the player with varying flashback scenes depending upon your choices, but it feels more like a quick way to tie those loose ends together and put Clementine back onto a single track.

But that’s not entirely unexpected. These games always have their limits when it comes to pushing their branching narratives. At some point, those loose threads have to be weaved back together. Like the previous Seasons, A New Frontier has a lot of ‘big’ choices that don’t really change anything at all – whatever option you pick, the outcome will always be the same.

What it does do well (and probably even better than what I remember of Season 2) is to give your minor choices more impact. These don’t dramatically change the direction of the core narrative, but they do shape your experience as you play and do result in various characters living or dying as a direct result of your actions. Ultimately, the story is always heading in the same direction, but the path you take to get there will feel unique and personal to you because of the choices you’ve made.

The story of A New Frontier revolves around Javier and his family. Like Clementine, he has several flashback scenes, establishing the key relationship between him and his brother. Overall, I liked Javier and the new characters introduced, but I was still more interested in what was happening with Clementine. The game was noticeably less interesting when she wasn’t around.

A New Frontier is also pretty short compared to previous Seasons. You can clear the game in about 5 hours, although that’s partly due to the developers pretty much dropping the ‘exploration’ aspect of gameplay entirely. There are some moments where you can guide Javier about the local environment and click on various items, but those are few and far between. The point and click ‘puzzle’ aspect really doesn’t exist here. You are, more or less, just playing through a visual novel.

Overall, A New Frontier was a fairly enjoyable story to play through and I was pleased by the scene variations based upon your choices – not only the choices you make here, but the choices you made in the previous seasons. I don’t think it’s as good as Season 1 or 2, but if you liked those and haven’t yet played this, then I’d say it’s still worth checking out on sale. I think I’ll also pick up the final season in the near future to see how Clementine’s story ends.

6/10