Clementine is introduced in the first season as a young girl, left in the care of her babysitter Sandra while her parents are out of town, at the start of the zombie apocalypse.

[2] The development team had considered the inclusion of a child in a dark storyline to be similar to previous story elements from Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic, but still had a difficult time of selling the concept originally.

[3] Sakai provided Vanaman with other advice from his fatherhood, offering that Clementine would appear smarter if she did not say as much, while still pointing out character flaws should one get out of line.

[3] Writer Jake Rodkin stated that the difficulties of writing a child character that the player wouldn't want to abandon led to serious discussion about dropping Clementine late in the development process, a week before voice recording was to start.

[5] The game designer and writer Harrison G. Pink commented that the in-game decisions were not meant to be good because there couldn't be an optimal play-through.

As they were in the midst of developing and releasing this season, the studio suffered from a major financial crisis, forcing them to lay off nearly all of their staff and shutter existing projects.

[16] Clementine makes a cameo appearance in the 2021 remaster of Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, with Hutchinson reprising her voice role.

[17][18] Clementine is introduced when Lee Everett takes shelter in her suburban home in Georgia to find refuge from zombies (referred to in-universe as walkers).

As a choice to the player, Kenny and Lee are forced to euthanize Duck or leave him to re-animate after he is bitten by a walker, causing Katjaa to kill herself.

During a walker attack, the combined groups are saved by the sudden appearance of Carver and his minions, who take the survivors as their prisoners to a well-fortified department store.

Seeing Carver's ruthlessness leads three other survivors, Jane, Mike, and Bonnie, to join Clementine and the others in plotting an escape before the store is overrun by a mass of walkers.

When they regroup, Kenny is distraught and refuses to talk to anyone, but he is convinced to help Rebecca give birth to her baby, which is later named Alvin Jr. or AJ.

Clementine sees that Rebecca has succumbed to exhaustion and blood loss from the birth, has died but is now re-animating as a walker, and she or Kenny are forced to shoot her to save AJ.

As they cross a frozen lake, their added weight causes the ice to break and one of their members, Luke, to fall through and drown.

After the fight, she finds AJ safely hidden in a nearby car as part of Jane's plan to expose Kenny's temperament and convince Clementine to abandon him with her.

Clementine takes AJ back to Ericson for medical treatment and warns the kids of Lilly's incoming attack, helping them prepare by fortifying the school.

She scouts the place and decides that in order to sneak in and rescue the captured kids undetected, a horde of walkers need to be lured in to distract the raiders.

Clementine, AJ, and Tenn escape from the walker horde and find either Violet or Louis, who helps them make their way back to the school.

They travel together and Amos reveals that he is going to Killington in Vermont to build a homestead on the mountain where he will be awarded with a plane ride after the job is completed.

They travel together for nine days and finally arrive at the base of the mountain, where they are met with twin sisters who won't tell them their names.

While Amos recovers, Left asks Clementine and Ricca to take a portable generator over to another ski lift so they can have more hunting territory.

They climb out of the chasm and head back to camp where Amos has recovered from his fever and the twins ask Clementine where she found the hatchet, she tells them Tim gave it to her.

She begs Clementine not to tell her sister, Clem promises she won't just as Georgia bursts in asking where Amos is, saying that the snowmobile and repaired generator are gone.

The pair find Clementine and tell her Amos fixed the ski lift but crashed the snowmobile, while they walk back to camp the see how real it now looks with the new structures they've built.

Georgia is trapped beneath snow and begs at her sister to help her, telling her she had to kill Amos because he was going to take Olivia away from her, she is then bitten by a walker.

Clementine eventually soon wake up and was greeted by Olivia, who told her that they had been saved by Emi, while also reveals that she had been unconscious for one month and her legs got infected as well.

There, Ricca introduces Clementine to the residents of the island, including Emi, John, Amir, Shu-Fen, Ginette, Giles, and Mercy.

Once they make it back to the door which is opened by Emi, they see the devoured John, who is revealed to have made big hole to kill the remaining walkers before it overwhelmed him.

Game Informer's Kimberley Wallace describes the character of Clementine as having "broken through the barrier [of the television screen], securing a place in the hearts of many".

[22] GamesRadar's Hollander Cooper and Sterling McGarvey wrote that the hopelessness of the world would be infectious if not for her constant optimism, giving you something to fight for.