The Walking Dead (2012)

'Clementine will remember that.' The line flashes in the corner after a lie or a kindness, and it turns every conversation into something you're teaching an eight-year-old. Lee Everett is being driven to prison when the dead rise, and soon he has taken in Clementine, whose babysitter has turned. Telltale's five-episode 2012 adventure is mostly talking, with dialogue choices on a timer, a few frantic fights and decisions about who to save. The branching is shallower than those prompts suggest, and it hardly matters: what you really shape is how carefully you speak to a child, and the final episode is where that lands. Ten to twelve hours.