The Wolf Among Us Review

An extreme heat hangs over the residents of Fabletown. As the humidity stifles the inner city woodlands area, an oversized walking toad is pushing your buttons and your arch nemesis is knocking lumps out of somebody upstairs. It’s going to be a long night. As Sheriff Bigby Wolf, it is up to you to keep the fairytale residents from killing each other, and you in the process. It’s too bad someone in Fabletown has different ideas…

A gritty prologue sets the scene in this successfully colourful, noir fairytale hybrid. A gorgeous palette of blues and purples offset the visual comic book style first seen in The Walking dead series by Telltale. Telltale have adapted The Walking Dead game engine into telling a new story based upon the overlapping lives of the Fabletown citizens, and for the most part has lovingly crafted a well conceived alternate universe. As previous games have proven, Telltale concentrate on getting the story right first. Much of the game is spent letting the narrative develop by choosing timed dialogue options which decide the path of Bigby Wolf and his investigations into the crimes of Fabletown. Action scenes take on a QuickTime event style in terms of combat or action set pieces. Simply touch the target reticle to interact with the happenings on screen. Controls are intuitive and takes little skill to progress through the fight scenes, which still manage to be fun to play. The story is compelling with a real want to make the right decisions to get the characters on your side. Whilst it can be difficult to do so, there is a real want to keep the peace in Fabletown. You are put in situations in which it is difficult not to let a character down or drop them in it with their fairy tale partners.

Conversation options affect narrative direction with characters remembering conversations and actions ultimately influencing story outcome. Moral decisions plague your character as the decisions of your big bad past make you question your role in the game. It is decisions like these that make the experience beguiling despite the level of interaction that really occurs (replay of the game reveals some choices make little to no difference despite the illusion of choice). Brilliantly complex anxieties and guilt driven decisions pervade your game play experience in your interactions with the fabled cast. For example, in one scene, you return to your apartment to find a pig called Colin sleeping on your sofa. Colin wants a smoke and is annoyed you won’t share your bourbon with him. He sets up a brilliant guilt trip in which he reminds you the reason for him being there is the fact you blew his house down. “Ok, Colin you can have my Bourbon…”

The modern characterisation is mostly successful in presenting updated versions of well known fables, myths and children stories except for an exceedingly poorly acted Mr.Toad who had me cursing the script writers (and voice actor) for creating such a hackneyed, cock-er-ney stereotype. Imagine Dick-Van-Dyke, deep in Mary Poppins’s chimney, inebriated on twelve cans of Stella, wearing a Kermit the frog fancy dress costume on New Year’s Eve, drooling into a post pub kebab and you are about five percent closer to realising how annoying this character is. Mr Toad’s profanity is largely gratuitous and only adds to a total dislike for the character’s scenes. There are plenty of ways to demonise characters without having to resort to product demeaning dialogue such as: “Cor blimey guvnor, oim in a roight old f£&-ing tizzy abowt this rigmarole”. The choice of language truly grates next to all other voice acting which is reasonably sophisticated and congruent with the tone of the story. Later on in this episode, another fairytale duo bring the tone down with their mock-ney dialogue. There is roughly two to four hours worth of content (I wasn’t really counting) which seems fair given the price of the app. The choice to make the series episodic seems a clever way to maximise revenue for an App Store game which given the overall quality of the game, I simply can’t begrudge. I must admit to being hooked and only disappointed to find there were no more episodes released yet. The Wolf among us remains an Immersive whodunit that revels in making you squirm in it’s moral dilemmas. The only thing you need to decide is how big and bad you will be…