The Walking Dead Season 2 and Michonne

Now that Halloween is coming up, it's zombie time. Last year, I took a peek at the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. Thanks to Humble Bundles, I got some more at the same time as the others. This is more of the same.

Sitting around the campfire.

The gameplay is the standard Telltale fare. You make choices. You click dialog options. You press keys to activate quicktime events. People remember things, but most of those things don't seem to matter. The story somehow manages to make most of your choices not matter much. At this point in the series, the zombies are merely decorations (albeit dangerous decorations) in the backdrop.

The story is what this game sells, so I won't spoil it (much). You play as Clementine, the girl from the first series. You start off journeying with a pregnant couple (also from the first series). The boyfriend gets killed in the opening scene, and the pregnant woman disappears and is never heard from again. You meet up with some escapees from a sociopath's dictatorship, and decide to head north. (The last season took place in Georgia, so I guess this is somewhere in the Carolinas or Virginias? It's never explicitly mentioned.) When someone follows you for 100 miles at great expense to them, there's something seriously wrong with them.

A sociopath's dictatorship flotilla.

Then there's the Michonne spinoff. No characters from the previous seasons appear. You play as Michonne, who comes off as some sort of pirate queen. She and her crew stumble across another sociopath's dictatorship flotilla, and she deals with the ghosts of her past while getting out.

Graphics and sound are decent enough to get the job done. There's many areas where there are zombie sounds coming from behind a door, but you don't see any. I'm sure that's on purpose to creep you out, but the sound is coming from further in. Animations are a bit bugged: if you have keen enough eyes, you sometimes spot characters jumping around in the first frame after camera angle changes.

I'm not that enthusiastic about these, and I'm doubtful that I'll enjoy later installments, nor am I looking forward to them. (I don't have any more.) They don't push things. The gameplay is identical, and the story ultimately doesn't raise the stakes. I played these to check the box. I'm posting this to end my daze and escape mediocrity.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

The Walking Dead
Hey look, a game for Halloween! (Yes, I planned this one, unlike last time.) I've finished playing through The Walking Dead, the game that Telltale Games got popular on. This is one of those games from the zombie craze that reached its height around 10 years ago. I think this rode the coat tails of a Netflix series based on the same comic series, but the game has different characters and story. It merely takes place in the same world.
Tales from the Borderlands
Borderlands 3 has been out for almost a year, but I haven't bought it yet. Yes, I'm aware that it's on Steam these days, but I haven't been that enthused about it. I'll probably get it in the next Steam sale, along with the Halo collection (because I threatened a long time ago to buy it if it came to Steam). I intended to play through all the Telltale games in order of release before I got to Tales from the Borderlands (and all that before Borderlands 3), but that hasn't happened. Even without that, I recognized lots of tropes of the latter Telltale games (Walking Dead and afterwards) that I've heard told over the years. I'm pretty sure that there's no kind of continuity to spoil by not playing through them in order of release.
The Wolf Among Us
Like the Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us is a series based on comic books. (I'm not familiar with either comics.) The setup is simple: all the fairytale characters were forced to leave whatever kingdoms they lived in, and are holed up in New York City scraping by. You play as Sheriff Bigby Wolf. (Bigby Wolf -> Big B. Wolf -> Big Bad Wolf) Because I've portrayed this guy in school plays, I'm immediately on his side.
Sam & Max Save the World
From way back when point and click adventure games ruled PC games, there was a dog and a rabbit. These buddies went around as private investigators solving stuff. I'm not sure which stuff in particular, because I missed the boat. The series wasn't a blockbuster take-over-the-world smash hit, but it had a dedicated following.
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse
The game opens and closes every episode with a narrator. He doesn't do much, and only explains obvious things that I could figure out myself. He has a slight British accent, but he isn't Stanley's. The office that Sam and Max uses is unavailable for the entire game. They were kicked out between the last season and the first episode of this one. The C.O.P.S. have moved into the Desoto, and Sam uses it as a mobile office.
Borderlands 2
Sequels. In every form of media, there are sequels. Generally, the more of them there are in a series, the worse it is. Even the first sequel can come with numerous problems that make the original still hold value. Borderlands 2 is not one of them.