There’s a new Overwatch CGI short, and no, it’s not that painfully brief Junkrat and Roadhog comedy sketch from the other day. This time around, Mei’s the star of the show, largely because all of her friends are dead.
The new short is a re-telling of Mei’s origin story, beginning with a cryo-hibernation gone wrong while her and her team at Ecopoint Antarctica are trapped in an ice storm. When Mei comes to, she finds that everybody else’s pods malfunctioned, and she’s the only survivor. Also, she’s been in suspended animation for nine years, and she has no way of making contact with the outside world.
Mei, with the help of her drone pal Snowball, has to science her way to freedom. It’s a fraught, lonely process, and Snowball has to take one for the team. Mei, though, hangs tough.
In the game, Mei is a frozen-hearted ice demoness who stops people dead in their tracks and then jams icicles through their brains to make them even deader. Also, annoyed. After this short, though, you almost feel bad for her. Almost. Then you remember that she’s Mei.