I found the opening episode to this three part miniseries to be dull, repetitive of The Walking Dead story and a tired use of quick time events to break the monotony of a slow paced story. With ‘Give No Shelter’ serving as the middle chapter of the series, I was hoping for something to stand out and grab my attention. Sadly it only continued to disappoint and was an unenjoyable waste of just one hour of gaming time.
That is correct, it took just one hour to complete ‘Give no Shelter’ which has to be one of the shortest episodes of any TellTale Series I have played. I was taken back by just how quickly the achievements for completing each chapter were popping on my Telly screen. The first few chapters were made up of making player choices and some unexciting combat QTE sections which were quite frankly impossible to fail add Michonne and Pete try to escape the settlement ran by the brutal brother and sister team of Norma and Randall.
As Michonne is the focus of this miniseries, the choices the player will be asked to make will shape her character in the eyes of the player more than the other characters in the story, and ended up merely being black or white decisions. Though the story narrative does try to add some dramatic context to those choices overall you will either choose to let Michonne make a dark choice or try to give her a chance of redemption with a more light and humane choice. We do get to learn more about her past as the world fell into the zombie apocalypse, which has been the underlining story tease in revealing the traumatic event that Michonne is tormented by since episode one ‘In too Deep’, but with only an hour of gameplay, it is frustratingly used in ten minutes of flashback story telling.
I cannot escape the sensation that instead of a three part miniseries, Michonne could and should have been released as a single story experience. Episode one was dull and episode 2 is more dull and just too short. It would have been more enjoyable if it had been kept together as one spin off story told in the same style as the DLC ‘400 Days’ and has lost most of its story telling impact as a result of the split. Making it worse are the inexcusable drops in framerates and stuttering during cutscenes which is just poor forma TellTale title in 2016.
The Walking Dead – Michonne could and should be a more captivating telling of this fan favourite character’s story but after two rather weak episodes, it has been a squandered opportunity with a short story forced to be spread across three parts. The QTE sections are far too easy to be considered fun and the story takes too long to get to key points and far too quick to get the interesting character moments over with.
Episode three needs to deliver a big finish to salvage any positivity for me about this miniseries story experience. But sadly once again I find myself not enjoying this uninspired and poorly executed spin off that wastes the chance of doing something fresh with The Walking Dead universe and simply comes across as filler.
