It doesn't take long playing the new Walking Dead season to get back into the Kirkman mindset of nihilist despair and remember Telltale's weird obsession with child anguish.
On encountering a room of supplies you know that despite appearing to be abandoned the correct decision is to not take other people's stuff. You know that on encountering other people compassion or forgiveness is impossible. It isn't enough to move people on or maybe steal their stuff in compensation.
Instead slights must be avenged, face must be saved and "justice" must be done.
When late in the first episode Clementine tells you that if you don't kill all of your attackers then they'll just keep coming after you, you know its true. Because its true, when you fail to kill all of them, they come after you and then kill an entire settlement as collateral damage.
The child horror is unrelenting as well. Clementine sports a homemade tattoo but at least that's a moment of her choosing to commemorate something, she has also been branded and I feel that's not going to have been a positive, life-affirming event.
You know characters are going to die but in the middle of having a life-affirming moment with a ten-year old, her brains are blown out, by middle-aged bandits. You may want a bleak story but consistently maiming and killing girls starts to feel less than just despair about the human condition and more about a desire to smother life at birth.
The underlying weakness of this instalment of the series though is the refusal to have your choices make real impact. I chose to tie a character's hands, only to see them effortlessly free themselves two scenes later.
The rules of the genre are also becoming clearer to me, when someone blames you for something why try to forgive them or talk them round? By now we know grudges are things that are to be savoured and nurtured. It is easier to kill any new character who seems bitter.
Crazily even their friends accept your story of self-defence. Shaking their heads and telling you that you are "the boss".
I have a strong emotional connection to Clementine, a tribute to the writers who made you raise a virtual child in the hardest circumstances. But Kirkman's individualist philosophy and commitment to the evil of humanity is as dull now in the game as it was in the comics.