On paper, it shouldn’t have worked. James Gunn’s films had already defined these characters for a generation: Star-Lord’s mixtape swagger, Rocket’s prickly cynicism, Groot’s three-word vocabulary of heartbreak. A licensed episodic game could have easily been a pale imitation. And at times, it is. The humor doesn’t always land, the action sequences feel stiff, and the Telltale engine creaks under the weight of space battles.

The plot kicks off with the team looting a mysterious artifact called the Eternity Forge — a device capable of resurrecting the dead. Peter Quill, still haunted by his mother’s final moments, sees it as a second chance. Rocket sees a weapon. Gamora sees a threat. And Drax, in one of the game’s most poignant subplots, stares at the Forge and whispers the name of his lost daughter.

Is it clunky? Absolutely. Animations clip through helmets. Some puzzles are padding. But Telltale’s Guardians understood that the Guardians aren’t heroes because they save galaxies. They’re heroes because they keep choosing each other despite every reason not to. In a genre obsessed with world-ending stakes, that small, human (and raccoon, and tree) truth is worth revisiting.