The Wolf Among Us: Episode One

My, What Compelling Narrative You Have!

By Kevin Kauffmann on November 4, 2013 at 8:08pm

I squealed like a schoolgirl when I heard that Telltale Games was making a "Walking Dead"-style game based in the Fables universe starring Bigby Wolf.

This is the first time I’ve played a Telltale game since their attempt at the "Monkey Island" series, which was shrug-worthy, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ve heard their take on "The Walking Dead" was amazing, so I threw away my apprehension and bought "The Wolf Among Us" at full price, which is not something I usually do.

Thankfully, it’s been worth every penny.

Starring Bigby Wolf, the Sherriff of a community of immortal fairytale characters exiled to New York, "The Wolf Among Us" takes place in the 80’s, 20 years before the comics start. Even at the beginning of the series, there was a deep distrust for Bigby Wolf among Fabletown residents, and it’s been a treat to see how it originated at an even lower level just a couple decades before. Through the course of the first episode, we get to see and choose how Bigby tries to gain the trust of other fairytale characters like Snow White, Mr. Toad, and Beauty and the Beast, all while trying to solve a murder.

Honestly, it’s perfect.

Just like "The Walking Dead," "The Wolf Among Us" plays slightly like an old-school adventure game where each dialogue option is irreversible and some of them change the course of the narrative entirely. "The Wolf Among Us" even presented a heavy choice between which leads I should have investigated first, one of which led to an entirely different scene. Almost immediately after finishing my first play through, which took about two hours, I dived right back in and deliberately chose the opposite options just to see how it diverged.

I will be doing this in all of the following episodes, because there are already major differences.

What really made the experience enjoyable was that I started role-playing as Bigby Wolf unintentionally. There may have been better options and I might have missed out on some cool events in my “main” save file, but just a few minutes in, I was playing the game like I was one of the best characters in comics. It was incredibly immersive, everything looked gorgeous, and only a couple of things brought me out of the experience. One of these was an ambiguous dialogue option which instantly caused a fight, and the other issue was the fight and action sequences themselves.

Not to say that the fights and action sequences were bad! They were fun and were probably the most representative of actual game mechanics, but it did throw me out of the story when I saw a button flashing at me onscreen. I played with a controller, so some of the reaction windows were a little too short when it came to hovering over circles onscreen, but I only failed two or three of the interactions, so it wasn’t really that bad. All things considered, I can’t really complain about the sequences; it was a good way to mix up the experience.

Really, the only thing I can complain about it that there isn’t more of it. The first episode was only a couple of hours long and left with a huge cliffhanger (mostly), and they only just announced the release date for the next episode. It’s actually a little painful, especially since I now have two save files with diverging story lines, and I have no idea where it’s going.

Which, for an episodic series, is exactly what you want. If you like adventure games or anything Telltale has done before, pick it up. If you like engaging story lines, go ahead and pick it up. If you love interactive comics, go pick it up right now.

And then we can complain together that the next episode isn’t out yet.

Review Score: 9.5/10

Pros

Immersive storytelling
Gorgeous, living comic book-style art
Clever dialogue and faithful representations of characters from the comics
Replayability due to drastically diverging storylines
Voice-acting is superb
It's more Fables. That's always a good thing

Cons

It's less a game, more interactive movie
Some ambiguous dialogue options, one of which led to a very annoying misstep
My eye is twitching because I don't have the next episode yet