“It’s not a fuzzy, fun-loving world, The Walking Dead. It can be emotionally draining to perform her.”
ABOVE: The art style of the game has really come a long way from season one. LEFT: Concept art for A New Frontier. OPPOSITE PAGE: The fate of toddler AJ, Kenny and/or Jane is told in shocking flashback sequences.
season. Its answer was to move the story along a few years – with Clementine’s missing history told in flashback – and introduce a new playable character, Javier Garcia, voiced by a newcomer to the series, Jeff Schine. With Javi the focus of the story early on, Telltale also made the wise decision to release the first two episodes of A New Frontier, subtitled ‘Ties That Bind: Part 1 and 2,’ back-to-back, giving players the opportunity to get to know him a little better. Initially, this was a little jarring, after all it’s the continuing story of Clem that we have all invested in, but it didn’t take long for the now teenage heroine to make an appearance. And what an entrance it was – a shotgun held to the back of Javi as he makes his escape from some twitchy scavengers about halfway through episode one. Throughout the series’ run, Clementine has been voiced by actress Melissa Hutchison. So what did she make of returning to the series after quite a gap since the release of the last
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season (2014)? “It’s amazing to be back,” she says, in a tone that is so unlike Clem’s it’s always surprising to hear her true (much deeper) voice. “I miss being Clementine when I’m in-between seasons; it almost feels like there’s a chunk of my life missing just because of how close I’ve become to her. It’s great to be back in the studio and finding an older Clementine.”
“It wasn’t too difficult finding her voice. We’ve spent a lot of time together now.” FINDING THE VOICE With Clementine now in her early to mid teens, Hutchison has had to modify the cadence of her character’s voice (just as she had to do for season two). A New Frontier’s Clementine is clearly older, and yet still it’s familiar as the little girl we met two seasons ago. “It wasn’t too difficult finding her voice,” she notes. “We’ve spent a lot of time