An experiment to see if the Walking Dead Season 2 is friendly to new players?
By Carly and  Paul Fiander
With the release of season 2 of The Walking Dead we thought it would be prudent to ask someone with no prior knowledge of the game to play and report back on how accessible Season 2 is to newcomers. 

Just to give you a heads up we promise no spoilers.

Firstly our reviewer is primarily a mobile gamer with occasional jaunts onto the PlayStation through Singstar and Call of Duty. So the Walking Dead represented her first entry into the world of adventure games. Anyway just for full disclosure she hates zombies so has never seen or read any other Walking Dead related.

To start things off the control scheme is much the same it was in series one. The simplicity allows easy entry and that's a positive. However there are times where it can be frustrating knowing what to do next especially if you are unfamiliar with trial and error gaming. Everything is there on screen it’s just knowing where to look that is the difficult proposition.
Graphically the game looks a step up and this helps with the immersion into the title. Chararacters still do not have fully fluid movement but the style makes you forget that pretty quickly. At times you feel like you are watching a truly immersive comic.

Now we come to the elephant in the room the story. All we have spoken about before is merely window dressing for the narrative. Telltale have returned with their plot synopsis system from Season 1. It seemingly did a good job of placing you in the world, with a good grounding in the key events that have got Clem to this point. The trouble is a highlight reel dues not give you any clue onto why you should care about this little girl. In the first episode she is a frightened passenger tagging along for Lee's journey.  In this episode she is tougher and that reduces the need of the player to feel as protective of her. This for me is the crux of the experience and I got the feeling this was missing in Carly’s time in game. 
The telling part of this experiment though had to be her ambivalence towards Clementine. This points to the fact that although you can jump into Season 2 and get caught up pretty quickly you will lose a large chunk of the game in terms of emotional investment. So for this reason our advice is play Season 1 first and you will not be disappointed when you eventually pick up Season 2.

The cruel thing about using my Wife (yes Carly the tester is my other half) to test this game is I could have damaged her intrigue into the genre as I know she hates Zombies, but there is always the Wolf Among Us in case she caught the Adventure game bug.