My girlfriend and I love to play certain video games together. Especially the cinematic story-driven kind of game. We just finished playing the Telltale game “The Walking Dead: Michonne.” We have played Telltale’s previous "Walking Dead" games and we both enjoyed them. After a while, you expect the choices in the game to become repetitive. Though it never seems to get boring, every choice you make carries meaning and impacts the story in a heavy way. It may be small choices, whether to lie to a certain character or to kill another. Whatever the choice may be, it carries along the entire narrative that’s being played out.
This series follows Michonne from the comic books. She is separated from the familiar group that we watch in the television show. In this narrative of the game, she is dealing with the loss of her daughters and periodically they make an appearance in the game to reiterate that issue, though in my opinion it happens way too often. A majority of the game is Michonne reacting to the ghostly images of her dead daughters. It really drives home the point that they died because she abandoned them. Towards the end of the game, I found myself yelling at the screen telling Michonne to just let them go. My girlfriend’s reaction was similar in which she would yell every time they showed up on screen “OH COME ON!” Michonne is in quite a pickle in that she can’t seem to escape her past. Her solution is to isolate herself and limit herself to a smaller group so that grief does not affect her and put others’ lives in danger. (Oh how quickly that goes south.)
She is trying to repair a ship when she is thrust into the middle of a conflict when trying to scavenge parts for the repair. At first, we the players are skeptical of the characters we’re meeting and cannot determine which party is telling the truth. My girlfriend and I quickly decide to just go along with Sam, because she is a kid and what reason does she have to lie. Plus, what kind of kid can massacre the people you find upon first scavenging for parts? (Upon further thought I believe Carl is capable of mass murder so scratch that thought that kids can’t be murderers. Thanks Negan.) So we choose to side with Sam and her family and to fight against Norma and her brother.
For the course of the game, Norma and her brother Randall are the antagonists. Telltale does such a great job at writing bad characters. They do such an amazing job that soon after the introduction of Randall, my girlfriend and I wanted to have the option to kill him. The writing in this game, however repetitive it may be for Michonne’s daughters, made Randall a more easy-to-hate character. At one point in the game you capture Randall and even when he is captured he can be a nuisance. He kills a character that has little meaning to you but impacts Sam and her family and that impact only makes the player angry. He follows up the murder by teasing Michonne about her daughters and the loss of the character that he just murdered. So you better believe when the choice came down to bashing his head in or letting him live we chose the appropriate option.
Overall the game is great, the writing is fantastic, and the characters are super compelling. It immerses the player into Michonne’s shoes and you can really feel the weight of every decision you make and of every emotion the characters you interact with are feeling.
