What can you say about a Telltale game that hasn’t been said before and won’t spoil anything for readers? That’s a question I expected to struggle with when reviewing The Walking Dead: Michonne. Fortunately, it’s one that I managed to answer in short order, and not just because the episode itself is short.

The main reason for this is because Michonne is no ordinary character, and you're made aware of that fact from the very start of the episode. This much will already be obvious to fans of the Walking Dead universe, but it's a point that's driven home from the offset in the game itself, with Michonne taking on a horde of walkers with relative ease. The rest of the episode drives the point home with regularity; from Michonne's offhand dispatching of zombies to the dialogue options you're presented with to characters' fear of you. And boy doesn’t she know it.

This badassery means that the entire game has a different tone from other Telltale games. In those other titles I usually try to play the good guy, making sure to keep everyone happy and... well, alive. Not so much in The Walking Dead: Michonne, where playing as such a strong character makes you feel less inclined to play nice. It also comes with its own perk of featuring quite a few action sequences where walkers are dealt with head-on.

It’s a unique and empowering experience, playing a Telltale game from a position of strength, and genuinely makes for an entertaining adventure once you get into the swing of making decisions the way you think Michonne would in the comics or tv series.

The Telltale game engine seems to have received a graphics upgrade, with the presentation on show in this particular episode being far more polished than in past Telltale titles. The character models are more detailed and their animations feel more natural, which all comes together to make it a great game to look at, something the screenshots accompanying this review (all captured by me in-game) hopefully portray well.

There are inevitably downsides though. The side characters you meet throughout the episode aren’t interesting in the slightest, which ruins the whole point of a Telltale game. Their lack of back-story and two-dimensional motivations leaves much to be desired, and the episode's short runtime gives you little chance to learn more about them.

This lack of care for the secondary characters is in stark contrast to the Michonne's more complex character - one that series fans have come to expect and which is portrayed very strongly here. Her cool and collected demeanour has always betrayed a sense of strength and power that's lurking just beneath the surface. Enigmatic and mysterious, Michonne has always been an intriguing character, but in this episode she is the only one that this description even remotely applies to. As a result, the episode's main decisions are left feeling hollow and relatively trivial because ultimately the player has little reason to care about whether the other characters live or die.

There are hints of more significant and interesting narrative arcs to come - ones that will hopefully play out in the coming episodes, with Michonne's own past being one of these - but with how haphazardly the rest of the characters' narrative arcs have so far been handled I'm a little wary of the outcome.

In Too Deep is short but refreshing because it's headlined by a genuinely interesting character, but the rest of the cast feels hollow, at least in this first episode. Some interesting moments, including fun action sequences, are on show, but I'm a little nervous about this spin-off series' future because, as things stand, I’m not very invested in the narrative at all.