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Early in the second episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season 2, Clementine engages in a conversation with a new character. It’s a difficult conversation, with each choice you make carrying a weight that will likely not be revealed for a while yet, but there is a definite sinister tone to the dialogue. And then, with only a few carefully chosen words, everything you took for granted in the previous episode is brought into question, and the story goes in an unexpected new direction.
And all from one, brief conversation.
Telltale once again manages to craft a story that is never quite what you think it is going to be. The game leaves an obvious set of connections for you to make, then shows you the logic in your thinking. Are the people you are with really your friends, or has circumstance tricked you into thinking that? Are you fooling yourself, or are they fooling you? Will you stand by them? Should you stand by them?
Telltale is at the top of its game in A House Divided.
However, some decisions are so immediately impactful that you may not want to make a decision at all. It isn’t about choosing the right or wrong answer, it’s about choosing sides. No matter what, there will be fallout.
The game also never lets you forget who it is that will pay the price for those choices. In Season One, protagonist Lee Everett was a grown man. Conflict was unfortunate, but inevitable and as a grown man, Lee could handle the consequences. In Season Two, the protagonist is Clem, and 11-year old girl. It is massively unfair that she is constantly in a situation where her actions, regardless of her intentions, can end up getting people killed or causing conflict between others. But that’s the world of Walking Dead, and part of why Season Two is shaping up to be just as good, if not better than its predecessor. Episode Two hammers that point home, again and again forcing Clem to make impossible choices and then reminding us that she is a child.
Season Two is shaping up to be just as good, if not better than its predecessor.
In the first episode, the story was somewhat limited by the setup it needed to get out of the way. Players needed to reorient themselves to Clem as the primary character, an entire cast of new characters needed to be introduced, and both their situation and Clem’s involvement in it needed to be justified. It was a lot to get through, and the episodic treatment of the story turned out to be a slight disadvantage. Episode Two doesn’t have that limitation now that all the groundwork is laid, and it is one of the strongest single chunks of story in the entire series. There is no fat on it, no wasted moments of exploration or unnecessary dialogue. Every option is potentially impactful, and every move you make pushes the story further.
There is a bit more of a hands-off approach to this episode than most. You’re making as many choices as ever, maybe even more, but the amount of time you actually spend wandering around and solving puzzles as Clem is among the lowest in the series. That’s an inconsequential sacrifice though, since there is a weight to the choices you make.
This episode is also a visual improvement over the previous one, partly because the story takes place over a larger and more varied set of environments than the cabin and woods that were the focus last time. There is more to see, with impressive sights we haven’t seen before in the series, and a strong use of color that goes beyond the uniform, Earthy look of the previous episode.
The season can continue to churn out episodes as strong as this one, The Walking Dead Season 2 is on the way to matching the excellence of Season One. And that is saying something.
(This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360 and PC via a Steam code provided by the publisher)
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”