Note: This blog has major spoilers for all Telltale Walking Dead games up to 2016.

One of The Walking Dead's many strengths was how many themes the games managed to cover in so few episodes. The Walking Dead in 2012 and then The Walking Dead: Season Two in 2013 both explored issues of uncertainty, fear, sacrifice, survival, the loss of innocence, in-group fighting, order, ethics, and many other topics. However, the primary theme through the two mournful survival stories was the concept of a child getting separated from their parents or parent-surrogate. The first season had you trying to reunite Clementine with her absent mother and father, all the while the threat of her getting killed off lingered in the background, and the game's climax forced her into shooting her only remaining caregiver, Lee. Parallel to this story, we saw the death of the 10-year-old Duck cause his mother, Katjaa, to commit suicide and his father, Kenny, to become an emotional ruin. The second season continued to explore the psychological destruction of Kenny as a result of this tragedy. The same season saw Clementine learn to find her way in a merciless, parentless-world and Carlos unsuccessfully try to protect his daughter, Sarah, from a similar fate. The baby Alvin Jr. was born with two dead parents, appearing near the end of the game to have died through the neglect of one of his caregivers and there's even a passing implication that the pregnant Christa somehow lost her baby.

The Walking Dead's obsession with children might seem at odds with the value the games place on scripting complex characters and forcing you to make judgements about the appropriate treatment of other people. Children are, after all, not mature human beings, and it's hard to judge a kid harshly for their actions. However, children's ongoing development means that they are highly impressionable, allowing the games to have a speedy turnaround from showing the horrors children endure to the chilling impact it has on them. It also allows characters and players to make explicit decisions about how they want those children to develop: shielded from the trauma of the apocalypse or painfully prepared for what the life ahead of them will entail. Children's inability to make informed decisions means they don't usually have the moral greyness of adults, but their inabilities are what make the adults around them responsible for them. That responsibility is a powerful motivator for adult characters, and the maturity of The Walking Dead games is as much about the responsibility they give us as it is their darker themes.

While The Walking Dead: Michonne exists narratively as a standalone from the previous two games, the coals of these parent-child concepts burn as strong as ever. The first game was about a caregiver and their child's time together, the second game was about a child's life after being separated from their caregiver, and Michonne completes the set as a game about a caregiver's life after being separated from their children. Michonne abandoned her kids in a dangerous place, and it haunts her all the way along her journey. However, while the series has had its fair share of parents utterly destroyed by the loss of their kids, The Walking Dead: Michonne is forced to give us someone fierce and strong-willed in the face of that pain. Our title character has to keep plodding forwards because she carries us and the plot with her.

Michonne starts the game aboard The Companion, a Virginian fishing vessel crewed by her and four others. When she and the captain, Pete, investigate an abandoned ship, they get caught in an argument over supplies with teenage siblings Greg and Samantha. A third party joins the fray and recognising Samantha as a thief who took from them, captures all of you and takes you back to their community. There Greg is killed, but Michonne and Sam escape. From here on out, Michonne and Sam are hunted down by Norma, the head of the community, and Randall, her intemperate brother.

A vital nuance this game understands is that a person being proficient in combat and survival does not mean they are not emotionally vulnerable. Most other games assume that a character's physical fortitude and capacity for violence are an extension of some emotionally hardened nature and vice-versa. It's not a view The Walking Dead has ever had any intention of adopting, preferring instead, plotlines where average people who have no desire to engage in brutal survivalist behaviours are forced to do so. The character of Michonne shows the starkest divide yet between physical capability and emotional vulnerability. She's wounded but powerful, suffering post-traumatic psychological symptoms and yet typically responsible and composed. The most iconic symbol of Michonne's strength is her machete. Her possessing a blade as opposed to any ranged weaponry brings out a brutality in her fights; the physical effort she has to exert to use it is a show of how tenaciously Michonne struggles to survive. That doesn't mean that hacking your way through all that undead flesh is very fun, however.

The Walking Dead: Michonne comes after four years of roughly identical Telltale quick-time gameplay. The series is at more risk than ever of boring with highly familiar QTE fights and yet picks a protagonist which finds herself tussling in that kind of combat more than any player character has previously. It's not even a particularly fruitful way to characterise Michonne because the combat is interchangeable with that of almost any other Telltale title. Games say things about characters through the mechanics they give us when controlling them, and it's not appropriate that these games try and use the same ludological language to describe Michonne as they do to describe Rhys from Tales from the Borderlands. Batman: The Telltale Series shows us how The Walking Dead: Michonne could have done it slightly better, using faster and more complicated prompts to reflect Bruce Wayne's combat expertise. It feels like Michonne could have used a dose of the same. There are also too many QTEs in this game which are scripted to fail. It's a practical technique for showing the debilitating effects of Michonne's psychological state, but otherwise, makes scenarios feel too predetermined.

Working out how to represent Michonne's trauma in a way that the player can be comfortable with is one of the game's biggest conundrums. When controlling Lee or Clementine, you could make informed decisions about how they would act because you experienced first-hand the adversities they endured. In Michonne, you're expected to inhabit a character whose traumatic events have occurred before the start of the story. It's a set-up that lets you play a new, but troubled character from the outset and shakes up the series format, but it still creates the question of how you are meant to be the actor behind Michonne when you haven't seen the events that motivate her. How can you understand Michonne without context for her actions?

The game's ultimate solution is to use Michonne's wavering mental health to visibly project her anxieties and history onto the world around her. She has horror-style hallucinations of her children, and their creepy presentation makes you feel some of the discomfort that Michonne must experience when thinking of them, but unfortunately, it's also a mode of presentation that alienates you from these people who Michonne is supposed to care for intimately. It's the same mistake Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs made. The technique which the game puts more effort into and thus gets better results from are the flashbacks. We're so used to non-linear narrative as something only the audience experiences or else any non-linear events the protagonist experiences simply being a memory or dream, that when Michonne has honest to god post-traumatic flashbacks, it feels novel. They allow the game to show the background to Michonne's current headspace and add layering to the story without breaking the crucial sense that we are Michonne.

However, if the rule of conventional storytelling is "Show, don't tell" then the rule of Telltale's format should be "Don't just show, make manipulable". Unfortunately, there can be no great manipulation of the flashback sequences because this would change the path of the Michonne's life in such a way that the events of the game might not take place. The on-rails nature of the narrative here robs us of agency during some of the most formative scenes for Michonne as a character. The approach here also fails to put us into the mindset of a guilty party. Guilt is an emotion that the original Walking Dead, in particular, knew how to bring out in players. You'd frequently have to make difficult decisions without the time or accompanying information to do so comfortably. In the heat of the moment, you could end up taking actions you later regretted and decisions that seemed like the only reasonable thing to do at the time led to dire consequences in the long-term. It was easy to feel remorse and end up asking yourself what you might have been able to change if you could just turn back the clock and do it all differently.

That is what Michonne experiences; she has an acute feeling of responsibility for abandoning her children and speculates endlessly about what she could have done differently. However, it's difficult to feel Michonne's sense of guilt when we as players did not commit to the decision to abandon those children. We're staring at a hardcoded plot point and so cannot be held responsible for the outcome of Michonne's actions. This freedom from culpability creates a break between ourselves and the player character.

The Walking Dead: Michonne has trouble not only syncing some of the protagonist's feelings with the player but also syncing plot events with the demons that plague its feature character. In any fiction, the scenarios the protagonist finds themselves in should in some way relate to their past experiences. It enables stories to show how those experiences have shaped the way in which that character engages with other people and life events, and allows commentary on their current circumstances. We can easily understand this practice by looking at The Walking Dead: Season Two, where we saw a Clementine who had been detached from her guardian asked throughout the narrative how she might behave when confronted with new authority figures. The final choice in Season Two then had us consider whether Clementine would still think about the preservation of another caregiver as essential or not. There's also a lot we can learn here from the original Walking Dead. The first series didn't comment nearly as much on characters' actions concerning past events, but it provided relations between characters that were even more relevant to what Michonne is going for.

It was no coincidence that the first Walking Dead gave so much screen time to Kenny and his family in a story that was first and foremost about Lee and Clementine. As substitute parents for Clem, you and Lee could empathise with Kenny over the death of his son, and the demise of Duck constituted the game virtually threatening to kill off your child. It reminded you of Clementine's fragility and urged you to ruminate on what you or Lee would do if it were her in Duck's place. In fact, while Kenny's storyline was the one with the most ability to speak to Lee's relationship with Clementine, every instance of how loved ones treated and protected each other could be used as a sounding board to look at the Lee/Clem partnership.

Michonne tries to take the best parts of both games. As in Season Two, we get to decide whether the main character's past trauma makes them callous or sympathetic. But, as in Season One, we get to control an adult, there's no barrier between us and the other grown-ups of the world as there was with Clementine. Also similar to Season One's set-up, part of the supporting cast is a family which allows us to display how Michonne currently feels about her motherhood and describe how that might change over the course of the story. The Fairbanks family comprise the injured Samantha and deceased Greg, as well as single father John, family friend Paige, and two younger kids. If you show distrust of the Fairbanks that signals Michonne having difficulties interacting with families after losing hers while showing more sensitivity to them indicates Michonne using them as surrogates for the family she could not protect. Given that the Fairbanks provide such a useful tool for realisation of Michonne's feelings, it comes across as a mystery why we don't see more of them.

While you can see a glimmer of the same drive that led Michonne to protect her children in the way she provides Sam with a shoulder to lean on, Sam is a teenager and Michonne can't have the same manner of relationship with her that she had with her own younger kids. Michonne's time to shine or shrink as a matriarchal figure only comes near the end of the story when she and all the Fairbanks work together to try and prevent themselves being slaughtered at the hands of Norma's people. Here Michonne is granted some quiet moments with the group, including the two youngest members. In these hushed meetings, it feels like our protagonist gets to protect or harden the children the same way she would with her own if she still could. These are the kind of moments that are missing from the vast majority of the game.

Perhaps the writers at Telltale didn't want Michonne spending too much of her time with a child or children when that was the crux of the 2012 game. None the less, if you're going to define a character by her fixation on her children and not give her children through which to explore her thoughts and feelings, you might be writing yourself into a corner. Like The Walking Dead: Season Two, The Walking Dead: Michonne lets up on the ethical quandaries and inter-faction squabbles that the original game kept close to its heart. Arguably, the series isn't nearly as textured without them, but when the games pull back on these questions, they allow you to make a more complex protagonist. When the game doesn't shackle you to someone you're always trying to make into the good guy, you can develop a character who has more shades of grey. The strength of the approach lies in allowing a more probing spotlight to be put on the protagonist, but if the other elements of the game aren't set up to provide a considerable degree of insight into the main character, the approach falls flat. You end up with a story that's neither ethically challenging nor painting any detailed portraits of the characters within and The Walking Dead: Michonne is a prime example of this mistake.

It's not just Michonne that suffers a lack of nurturing by the writers either; it's the whole cast. The people and plot you bump up against often feel like amalgams of elements from previous Walking Dead games. Characters like Sam, Zachary, and Greg are drawn from the same cloth as characters like Ben, Arvo, and Sarah, panicked young people in over their heads. Pete is likeable, but he's not much more than the kind character, quite like Lee was. Being captured and taken to Norma's semi-civilised community has echoes of being captured and taken to Carver's gated community. Then there's Randall, who you can easily understand the motivations of but comes off as incurably one-note.

Some of the characters give hints that they have more going on under the surface, mainly the ones who show range. Norma may be in a similar role to Carver and even look a bit like him, but she's also someone who has both a sense of ethics and is in charge of one of the most structured outposts seen in the games. When it comes to rebuilding just human society, Norma may be the most successful character we've seen in the series. She also shows a surprising amount of leniency, even when you've burned down her entire town and held her brother hostage, but you only get a couple of glimpses of her through the game and then she's chewed up by zombies in the final scrap. There's also Paige who shows both venomous mistrust and gentle compassion within a short timeframe without the two coming across as contradictory, but she's one of the Fairbanks so your stay with her is quickly cut off.

It's a shame because when the story starts up, and you're on the ship, sailing along that foggy shoreline, you feel like the game's hit on something unique for the series. There's a murkiness and listlessness in drifting across those muggy waters that speaks in a whole new way to the bleakness of that world and the mental state of the protagonist. But then you get off the ship, and it's back to searching for supplies and arguing with raiders the same way you would in any other zombie story.

One restriction for the Walking Dead writers is that unlike the other genre mediums, zombie apocalypses don't have a lot of fuel for diverse plot ideas, imagery, and locations. Fantasy and sci-fi settings facilitate many different kinds of places, technologies, magics, or intelligent beings. When you need to make the sequel to your last fantasy or sci-fi, you can invent new MacGuffins to kickstart new plots and can imagine whole new species as your antagonists or entirely new alien cities for your heroes to encounter. In zombie fiction, there are only humans, and they're left in a world devoid of working towns, powerful technologies, and societies as we know them. The characters will never find alien places, people, or tools; they will never be granted magic problem-solving devices; and there will never be catastrophic universal forces coming for them. In these apocalypses, culturally distinguishing features like art and architecture are also rarely produced, as people don't have the means to make them and must prioritise survival before self-expression. Even the pre-apocalypse cultural creations decay and are abandoned as people try to survive outside of towns and cities.

The conventions of the zombie apocalypse genre create bleak atmospheres, and if there are serious creator/s on the project, they push those creators to reach hard to find new story elements and to focus on the human beings instead of the shiny world paraphernalia. These constraints may have birthed a lot of The Walking Dead's art style and cast diversity. Being set in what is roughly the real world, The Walking Dead needs visual twists to match its emotional vision while remaining relatively grounded in its style. It does this not just through its cel-shading and dark colour palette, but also in the way it uses its line art. Lines are thick and many across the characters, creating creased clothes and worn faces that embody how draining living has been for these people. You get a similar effect from the slight watercolour style across their skin and garments, showing roughness and unevenness. At the same time, the genre's distance from fantasy and sci-fi means it can only depict humans as we know them and can't dress them especially ostentatiously, so the game turns to more relatable markers of diversity; it ensures it has a breadth of gender, races, and ages.

Still, special touches like the cast diversity or the art are only able to come about because the developers are trying so hard. Perhaps the primary challenge of the post-apocalyptic genre is that without easy ways to introduce new world elements, it's commonplace for these properties to end up retreading the same ground. In the case of The Walking Dead, we've already seen the death of the loved one, the grand betrayal, the fight over the supply cache, the gated community, and many other tropes, but they're all recycled to be used again in The Walking Dead: Michonne. It's hard to see where the series should have gone if not back to these tropes, but if there's to be the maximum diversity in the plot and characters, it's contingent on the writers taking the time to add unique details into each scenario the game uses. It is possible that The Walking Dead: Michonne not taking the time to build out characters and events on their own individual branches is a big reason for why this game exists in its disappointing state.

While The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: Season Two ran for five episodes, Michonne was limited to a tight three. The individual instalments in here aren't as densely packed with exposition and character development as those of previous games, and again, the Fairbanks could be better hitched to Michonne. However, you can also see how a harsh deadline may have caused the game to prioritise getting from the beginning to the end of the arc over developing these wayward survivors. It is almost impossible for a piece of media to carry a crawling pace, lots of calm scenes, rich characters, a whole lot of plot, and a length of only a few hours. Typically, media must drop one or more of these aspects to incorporate the others. This is the compromise The Walking Dead: Michonne has to make, and while that leaves it likely to be remembered as just another Walking Dead game, there are still investigations of themes and storytelling techniques in here that represent substantial contributions to video games as a medium.

Even in 2016, Michonne is one of the few black female protagonists in video games and this story semi-successfully ventures into the territory of motherhood and child loss. The successes it does achieve are best exemplified in the final choice of the experience. By the end, Norma's people have breached the fence around the Fairbanks' home and set it alight. As Michonne goes to climb out of the window of the burning building, she has one last hallucination of her children begging her not to abandon them. The scene from Michonne's past and the scene in the present blur into one as models and effects from each coalesce in the same space. You can have Michonne walk away from her imagined children and escape the blaze or have her stay with her son and daughter and choose to burn. In classic Walking Dead fashion, however, it's not you who suffers the consequences if you decide to stay behind in the home. If Michonne died in the house, we'd be without a means to personally reflect on the ending because she's the character we express ourselves through. There would also be no means for her to appear canonically in other Walking Dead materials. So Sam, an innocent girl, rescues Michonne from the house, before the floor underneath her collapses into the fire, and she burns to death.

You don't get many chances to make symbolic gestures in video games and even when you do they're rarely as powerful as this one. If you embrace the children, you show that Michonne is still ruled by her trauma but loves her family. If you leave them, you show Michonne getting over her pain, but none the less you require a certain degree of coldness to do so. There may be no single point in another Walking Dead game where you do more to define a single character. The decision is also impacting on a more literal level. All those problems of not being able to put yourself in Michonne's headspace during the previous hallucinations melt away as an innocent and convincing illusion of her children provide an emotional pull that can make you take actions that would seem irrational and delusional from an outside perspective.

The intelligence of this final choice is not just in its literal or symbolic relevance, but in it being both so literally and symbolically relevant at the same time. I've seen prompts in other games that ask whether you want to save or sacrifice your character, I've seen prompts that ask you to make a conclusion about your character, but in this instance, both of those demands are superlatively encapsulated in a single choice. This lone scene also wraps up the whole plot surprisingly neatly. It at once concludes Michonne's arc of flashbacks, her guilt over her past, her journey escaping Norma's people, and her time with the Fairbanks. The hallucination format makes this wrap-up seem to come out of nowhere and yet make total sense. There may be nothing else like it in media. There's also an important point made by it being Sam that gets hurt if Michonne gives in to delusion. Mental health issues often don't just hurt the sufferer but also the people around them.

While the fire scene is the last chapter, the game also has an epilogue of sorts. A title in this series, for the first time, features a gentle wind-down rather than a hard finish. You get to make one last decision, not in the heat of some tearful scene of separation, but against a solemn yet calm shoreline. Michonne reunites with Pete and may tell him that she wants to return to her old group and find her kids or declare that she's going to stick with him and the other sailors of The Companion. You might view it as your chance to make a statement on whether Michonne has worked through enough of her baggage to feel comfortable going back to her kids, but that commentary would be diluted by there being multiple factors that might make you want to stay with or leave the crew. Maybe you like the crew a lot, maybe you can't stand them; maybe you think that the chances of Michonne finding her family are slim; maybe you think that the chances of survival are better away from the crew, maybe you think the chances of survival are better with them. Whatever statement you make here, it lacks clear subtext beyond a family vs. friends favouritism, but it's still nice to have a bit of agency at the end and to experience the game coming full-circle tonally.

The sad thing about the game's best bits being stowed away in this finale is that they're not perceptible to outsiders considering playing the game and aren't going to be discussed in the open by the fans and reviewers for fear of spoiling them. This means that a lot of the smart moves that The Walking Dead: Michonne makes aren't going to be part of the mainstream game discussion and may quickly be forgotten as part of interactive entertainment history. They're just too obfuscated by earlier blunders the title makes.

While it may feel like a remix of previous Walking Dead games and often fails to meaningfully interrogate its protagonist, The Walking Dead: Michonne is an admirable representation of loss as a parent and pushes boundaries with hallucinatory and non-linear storytelling in a player-controlled context. Let's hope it doesn't get lost in the fog of the narrative adventure landscapes. Thanks for reading.