Last year Telltale Games, wowed adventure game fans with The Walking Dead season one, making one of the best written adventure games in some time. And while we still have some time before season two, Telltale has another story to tell in the meantime with The Wolf Among Us.
( The following analysis will remain spoiler free of the plot of The Wolf Among Us outside of the general setting)
Once Upon a Time:
The Wolf Among Us is based on the graphic novel Fables, which is about fairy tale characters exiled to our world and secretly living in New York and as someone who has not read any of the comics, that’s all I can tell you about the back-story. You play as Bigby Wolf aka the big bad wolf, who is the sheriff of Fabletown where all the characters live.
When Bigby discovers a murder in Fabletown, it’s up to him to figure out what happened. The first thing you’ll notice is a more refined comic book art style compared to The Walking Dead. The environments looked amazing and the voice acting was pretty good.
As with The Walking Dead, adventure game logic puzzle solving takes a backseat to more of a “choose your own adventure” type feel. Bigby will have to make choices both large and small that will have an effect on the people and situations around him. And of course, that means making long term decisions that can come back to bite you later on, either in the episode or in later chapters.
The comic book art style has been given a major touch up since The Walking Dead
QTEs make a return but The Wolf Among Us is more lenient in not having every QTE be the difference between life and death. The faster paced action sequences add a little more excitement compared to The Walking Dead.
The story is another mature offering from Telltale beyond the profanity and brutal fights. Like The Walking Dead’s Lee, Bigby is a morally ambiguous character with a back story and personality all his own. And through the player’s choices you can affect how other people view him. I want to remain as vague as possible as The Wolf Among Us’s story is a big part of the game.
A smart decision by Telltale was to include unlockable bios of the characters and world in the form of the book of fables, as the world and characters are established already from the comic series.
The Wolf Among Us is built on The Walking Dead’s engine and it shows with some slight graphical issues. I noticed characters sometimes twitching and the background looking off a few times, but nothing damning. I would have liked a way to fast forward through dialogue as I didn’t see a way. Also, unlike the first episode of The Walking Dead, episode one of The Wolf Among Us was short at about two hours long, but it did set a lot of things in motion for future episodes.
Ultimately, The Wolf Among Us is going to be polarizing among adventure game fans as Telltale has drawn a line in the sand in terms of game mechanics. For the fans who like their adventure games to be full of brain twisting puzzles, The Wolf Among Us will be a letdown. But if you enjoyed The Walking Dead for its focus on character development and storytelling, then you are the right audience for this.
QTEs are the only real gameplay in the Wolf Among Us as puzzle solving has been toned down even further.
I am interested to see if The Wolf Among Us will let players have more of an effect on how the season ends or if it will be similar to The Walking Dead.
For a short episode, Telltale has already gotten me invested to see what happens next.
Because this is an episodic game, I’m not going to be analyzing every chapter as the mechanics probably won’t change that drastically, but look for a wrap up post when season one is all said and done.
