I’ll be honest, it took me some time to pick up Telltale’s first title, The Walking Dead. I had heard about how good it was, but it had been a long time since I’d gotten into point-and-click adventure games and I just wasn’t in that zone. Suffice to say when I DID pick it up I loved it. All of it. That first playthrough was fantastic, even if I learned after the fact that some of the paths might not have been as branching as I thought. What I’m trying to say is that going through that game was a terrific experience. Now, with Telltales second title having just dropped, what can we expect from The Wolf Among Us?
The parts you probably know already is that players take the reins as Bigby Wolf (Big Bad Wolf…. get it?), the man-beast that functions as the sheriff of Fablestown. You also probably know that it’s based on the Fables comic by Bill Willingham. Now if that doesn’t mean anything to you, like it didn’t to me, this world really pulls in an incredibly wide variety of fairy tale creatures. From Ichabod Crane as acting mayor, to Tweedly Dee and Tweedly Dum as criminal thugs, you’re going to see a lot of faces that you forgot about. Without spoiling anything, the narrative focuses around Bigby and Snow White (as the mayor’s aid) as they try and solve a murder mystery. The Woodsman and Mr Toad are also heavily featured, as well as the more obscure “Donkeyskin”, which is something you can wikipedia if you’re interested. Bottom line though, the hook got me. I want to see where the story goes.
So the overarching plot is good. The general thematic direction. But what about the writing? In a game so heavily focused on story, the actual writing is pretty important. The dialog between characters. So how did Telltale do here? In my opinion, they knocked it out of the park here as well. I loved most of the characters. Donkeyskin was properly mysterious. Mr Toad was a selfish jerk. Snow White was driven to do right, but a little down trodden. Bigby was whatever you wanted him to be. Telltale really did a good job using the character interactions to deepen and emphasize the atmosphere they set up with the game’s main theme. I also want to say that of the characters you meet in Episode 1, Mr Toad might be my favorite. He’s a huge jerk, but they do it in such a way that just oozes “little scum bag”. It’s great.
The visuals are the visuals. We’ve seen samples of those for weeks. The animations are well done, and the style seemed very… “down town noire”, if that makes sense. Much of the came takes place in seedy locations, with unscrupulous characters. The art style simply reinforces this. Same with the voice acting. You know what the performances are done well when you’re completely absorbed in the experience from start to finish without thinking about it. A player can’t really ask for anything more.
So we’ve covered all of what’s awesome about The Wolf Among Us, which is a huge amount of the game. The world is solid, the art is beautiful, the story is engaging… but the game isn’t perfect. The one chief complaint I had about this game were the controls. At points, the camera (controlled by the mouse) seems to be set on hyper sensitive. This makes clicking on specific objects of interest to be a little bit more of a chore than usual, not to mention giving you whiplash in the mean time. There are really only two times when this cropped up for me, but when you get there, you’ll know what I mean.
Bottom line:
The Wolf Among Us is worth your money. It’s shaping out to be a great story with interesting characters. It’s got some profanity and violence, so it’s not for your young kids, but anyone adult enough for that stuff should put in the 2-3 hours this episode took (future episodes will probably be similar in length if the game is anything like Telltale’s previous title).
