The Walking Dead: Michonne Review

As a lover of The Walking Dead games, enjoyer of the comics, and serial tolerater of the TV show, I was excited to see Michonne’s missing story in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead: Michonne.

I binged the whole three episode series in one emotionally gut-wrenching sitting. A few spoiler free thoughts:

1. The human antagonists (I would never call them villains) are deeply sympathetic and complicated. Telltale really goes out of their way to accomplish this.
2. There are no moments when I felt “Jesus why do I have to do this?” which I definitely felt in The Walking Dead Season 2 and The Wolf Among Us. I adored those games, but all of them had frustrating minigames, irrelevant interactions, or pixel bitching. None of that in The Walking Dead Michonne. These three episodes were all killer, no filler. Telltale was always great at telling a story, but I feel like this game never lost inertia and never felt boring. These three episodes were solid all the way through.
3. I wonder if the three episode structure forced the writers to create a succinct three act story, whereas the five episode structure forces a more complicated and difficult to accomplish five acts. And it’s even more difficult to create dramatic beats inside of each episode.
4. The in-action controls are better than ever. Quicktime events are not my favorite way to handle action, but the smoothness of that experience led to Michonne feeling like a bigger badass than either Lee or Clementine, which makes sense, given that she is much better adapted to surviving this world.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS for the game and the comic.

1. If you’re following comic, you know Michonne is going to make it through this. What you don’t know is how much death and destruction she’s going to leave in her wake. It’s a question of doing the ethical thing less than doing the sensible thing, if that makes sense. You’re not trying to keep a vulnerable character alive – you’re attempting to do the right thing. This affected my choices a bit.
2. Killing Norma at the end of Episode 3 felt incredibly awful, which I’m certain was intentional. Yes, she’s trying to kill you. Yes, her brother is vicious and sadistic. But in a lot of ways, she’s not a whole lot different than Rick Grimes. She’s a beleaguered leader trying to hold together a town full of survivors. She did a poorer job, for sure, largely because she let her brother Randall run buck wild, but killing her didn’t feel like justice, like killing the cannibal brothers or the kidnapper dad in Season 1, or Carver in Season 2. It just felt shitty, hollow, and empty. You killed so you could live. That’s it, that’s all. This is what the world is now.
3. Based on his behavior in my playthrough, I got the sense that Randall had a deathwish. He constantly provokes Michonne, despite knowing full well what kind of person he’s dealing with. He never begs for his life. He never asks for mercy. He never tries to convince Michonne that killing him is the wrong move. In referenced backstory, he keeps killing people, taking risks, and engaging in rash action. I believe he does this because he doesn’t want to live anymore, but can’t bring himself to commit suicide. I was hoping that I would get the option to call him on his bullshit during the “hand vise” scene, but no such luck. I feel like it was a missed narrative opportunity, but it didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the game.