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Clementine walking alone in Walking Dead Episode 5
Kareem Ali 4

Walking Dead Episode 5

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  • The good

    Great interactions between Lee and Clementine. Touching finale

  • The bad

    Confrontation was underwhelming and took awhile to get to that point

  • The ugly

  • Walking Dead Episode 5 – No Time Left is the final episode of season 1 and continues with the group planning to search for the kidnapped Clementine. The group suffered more losses in episode 4 and if that wasn’t bad enough (spoilers if you haven’t finished episode 4) Lee has been scratched and most likely will turn into a zombie as a result. So time is of the essence and the name of this episode is very appropriate. It starts out with the group still in the room where they went to find Vernon due to the belief that he had Clementine only to find it empty and that it wasn’t him. Zombies were of course right on their trail so first line of business was to find a way out of the room they’re trapped in and while looking Lee passes out. He wakes up to the members of the group getting ready to cut part of his arm off to stop the infection. As Lee, do you let them cut off part of your arm with the hope it could stop the infection, do you keep it thinking the scratch didn’t penetrate enough or is it too late one way or another?

     

    GAMEPLAY

    The ending of episode 4 was a great setup for the final episode. It created a sense of urgency unlike any previous episode with Lee being scratched but also raised a really good question of whether or not Clementine would be better off elsewhere. And there was the big mystery of who was communicating with Clementine all this time and took her. So this episode needed to answer questions and deliver in a big way. And I felt that the earlier episodes were at their best when they found the right balance between action, character interaction and advancement of the story with decision-making. This final episode tried to capture all of that but it struggled until late in the episode.

    Last person here didn't have much luck

    Last person here didn’t have much luck

    The first big decision was if Lee would have his arm cut off or not. It was an interesting choice to give especially considering he just fainted but it allows the player to choose what they believe to be the best to move forward. It puts the player in a position to make what is really a psychological choice more than anything if they were in Lee’s shoes. Depending on your choice it’s a very captivating scene. After continuing to escape through the elevator shaft the group ends up on top of the hospital in order to….find another way to escape. Somehow the once empty city is now filled with thousands of zombies. This isn’t fully explained but the assumption the characters make is they must have followed the train to town and just arrived. After using a trick that was learned in the previous episode the group is able to continue back to the house only to stumble on more bad news. Depending on your choices in the previous episodes the way you learn this changes but the result is still the same. And considering an entire episode was devoted to establishing a way to escape by boat and it was the plan for more than one episode I felt there needed to be more to the way this episode handled this situation. Instead the group is hounded once again by zombies and become trapped in the house so they have to…yes, find another way to escape. Seriously.

    There was no new game play elements in this episode but there was a brief moment where you had to give strategic commands to different members of the group by timed responses and it was interesting until it was all rendered irrelevant. And this is one of my problems with most of this episode. It was all about the group escaping from some room they were trapped in. The setup from episode 4 made it possible for episode 5 to be ripe with extremely interesting gameplay elements whether it was trying to manage the remaining group with different tasks or something of an investigation ala episode 3 to track down Clementine. Instead it was about the group continuously being trapped and finding a way to escape or search a room that didn’t yield any interesting results. There were some interactions between the characters here worth noting especially with Lee’s condition not improving. And if Ben survived in your group there was an interaction between him and Kenny that made me dislike him a little less but only slightly. Christa and Omid come off much better in this episode as well and that’s partly due to Lee’s condition and the obvious importance they would have to play if anything happened to him.

    photo (10)

    After realizing where Clementine must be the group makes its way there. Clementine missing finally no longer felt like a side story at this point. Due to circumstances it was inevitable that Lee would have to come face to face with Clementine’s kidnapper alone. And it felt underwhelming. For a series that was at its best in getting you to see the consequences of your choices due to the subsequent actions from as big as other characters living or dying to as small as who gets to eat the limited rations it was a dubious choice to recap all of that with a conversation. I believe the intention was to make the player face all the choices made all the way back to the first episode and the often talked about but not shown murder of Lee’s wife. And even though the one who took Clementine was psychologically manipulative it still didn’t have anywhere near the same impact as actually going through those events. I won’t spoil who it was or why it occurred but thankfully it wasn’t the finale.

     

    I’m glad  I can say the episode started to redeem itself as a finale when Clementine made her first appearance. Everything prior to this felt like filler and made me question if there wasn’t another way to achieve this same result. The strongest part in episode 4 in terms of interaction was the interaction between Lee and Clementine. It’s even more touching here. It brought to the forefront once again how devastating it is to survive in this world infested with zombies and dialogue options here bring back memories of all the interactions going back to the beginning and does it way better than the confrontation with Clementine’s kidnapper. And I haven’t mentioned it in my reviews of the previous episodes but the voice acting in the entire series was superb and these moments are captured perfectly. It’s easy to overlook the voice acting when it’s done so well but a phenomenal job was done here. The best parts in this episode by far were after Clementine made her appearance. Even the action was better than the action earlier in the episode because it felt like the action earlier was just to take up time and distracted from what should have been the focus. I won’t give it away but these were very powerful sequences that led to a very satisfying ending in terms of closure for a season.

     

    SUMMARY

    From the first episode to the last scene in the final episode the series was outstanding overall. Walking Dead Episode 5 – No Time Left gave this season a very satisfying end and makes playing every single episode worth it because of all that’s invested as a result. The story arc is riveting, the game play mechanics and decision-making were all instrumental in keeping it fresh and keeping the desire to see what was going to happen next strong. The characters were appealing for the most part and although the death of numerous characters weakened the interactions between the remaining characters for an episode it did an excellent job to make you care about the characters. The action was very entertaining and none of the episodes felt dull. This was an achievement in episodic story telling. I highly recommend the entire series and I’m definitely looking forward to season 2

  • Gameplay ( 8 )
    Graphics ( 8.5 )
    Sound Quality ( 8 )
  • Total score 8.2

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