The Wolf Among Us is a game developed and published by Telltale Games, best known for their The Walking Dead game and upcoming Tales From the Borderlands. Following in their episodic graphic adventure games, Wolf follows the same type of gameplay to be expected from Telltale. The game is primarily set in the world of Fables, Story characters from fairy tales of folklore, mostly Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Time to get to Howling with this Review!
Story
In The Wolf Among Us you play as Sheriff Bigby Wolf around the year 1980 in Fabletown, a part of Manhattan reserved for the fables, fairy tale and folklore characters. To live in Fabletown you must have a Glamour at all times, a spell that masks you to look like a regular human, and for people like Bigby who is The Big Bad Wolf, is a must. Those without Glamours and cannot pass for humans must live on a place called The Farm, which is advertised as a paradise, but for those who escape it is a hell.
Bigby is the Sheriff of Fabletown and must maintain control of the Fables who reside within it’s confines, as well as slightly further out of the protective spells of the Woodlands, an apartment complex for many of the Fables. During the game you must solve petty fights between Fables, solve mysteries and murders among your enchanted folk and make sure the outside world of Mundane folk, what the Fables call Humans, from finding out about the Fables.
Episode 1:
In the first part of the game, you start off with Bigby investigating a disturbance in Toads apartment complex in Fabletown, after Toad has rung you about Woodsman’s loud activities. You enter the apartment complex, and in your own way, sort out the Woodsman… though whatever you do a wall will be smashed and he will have an axe halfway into the back of his head.
From this scrap the story slowly unfolds, with a severed head being placed in front of the Woodlands apartments which sends Bigby on an investigation into who the victim was, why she was killed and who among the Fables would do such a thing. Though the mystery deepens and we are nowhere near the conclusion by the end of the first episode.
The first episode will only last you around 2 hours, 1 hour if you’ve done it once, but it feels a lot longer than it is and allows some exploration and different options which makes several playthroughs viable. I myself played with 2 saves, the Good Wolf and the Big Bad Wolf, both offering a well-crafted story, though I am sure there are other ways you can play this game since my first run wasn’t too perfect.
There isn’t much in the way of side quests or options for The Wolf Among us, rather conversation choices that lead into the continuation or interruption of the conversation. There seems to be a hidden Karmic scale within the game, as giving a downtrodden girl money, or ripping the arms off a Fable can lead to different Lore unlocks and change how your past had gone.
The choices themselves are mostly made during conversations, either telling the truth, giving mercy or deciding to beat someone for information instead of figuring out their lies.
Gameplay
The gameplay in The Wolf Among Us is very similar to that of the point and click genre, which brings many similarities to the Broken Sword series, not that I love that series or anything. You control Bigby with the WASD keys or the left thumbstick on your controller and move the cursor with your mouse or right analogue stick. You can investigate objects in the world with the X, B, Y and A buttons or clicking on the corresponding symbol with the left click, these being separated into interactions, investigations or combinations. For the Action parts of the game you are thrown into Quick time events galore, with pressed the keys to dodge, attack or choose where to move to next, these giving separate ways to track down a foe, or how you go about defeating them.
The first episode keeps to a pretty linear way of storytelling and gameplay aspects, with only one chase scene that allows 2 approaches. While there are choices to be made when deciding where to investigate first or who to arrest it is unclear how these will play out in the later episodes. The main choice you get is to go to Toads apartment first or to another house where a suspect dwells, one choice is the obvious choice if you play through the game twice as it offers no consequence, while the other means you lose a potential character.
Throughout the first episode you are given several choices during conversation, split between 2 – 4 responses. You can decide to play the silent wolf, the jokester, the Saint Wolf or the one who glasses and punches anyone he sees… I don’t need to tell you which are the most fun. Some of these offer different responses from the NPC’s, but most of the time they give the same reply which can really detach from the feeling of variety.
The conversation choices themselves can be very vague at times, with only 2 – 4 words to describe an entire paragraph that you will reply with; this can sometimes be infuriating but understandable with the amount of words that need to be displayed. There is also not a lot of time to respond, as sometimes you are only given around 3 seconds to select a reply, and if you don’t choose in time the silent option is picked for you.
For a game containing several story items I was disheartened when it felt as if you could hardly use them for anything, you can look at your items in your inventory but offers no backstory or information on them or even allowing you to try and combine them together. Though I do like how when you decide to use an item earlier then later it comes up in the story, for example if you give your money away at the start you cannot buy cigarettes or pay for a drink later on.
Overall Thoughts and Feelings
The music in The Wolf Among Us feels top notch and certainly follows its own style of music, keeping the same genre, tempo and atmosphere which really makes the music blend well from one track to another as you change scenes. The music is well placed as well, leaving you with quiet to no music whilst exploring and investigating to becoming louder with conversation, heated arguments and fight or chase scenes to ramp up the tension. It really brings home that this game is all about the mystery, the fantasy and the detective theme.
When the battles occur, me being an aspiring animator, the animations are lovely to look at, with smooth transitions from blow to blow and the pace at which each blow is delivered especially when bone breaking moves are made with such speed and precision. Though there is only 2 fights within the first episode it leaves you wanting more and makes the wait for the next episode even harder to bear.
The game lacks a fast forward feature, which I feel is sorely needed for several playthroughs as you will be listening and watching cutscenes and conversations for a lot of the time. This is more of a nuisance then a game breaking feature however. There is also a lot of lag issues to be found within the game, which are less prominent on the pc version, where the game with freeze, take longer to load or simple stop and start at points, mostly occurring during the loading of cutscenes or fight sequences. The Xbox360 version suffers more from this as some of the fight scenes can be very lag intensive.
Overall I would give The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 a 4/5, it brings beautiful themes and atmosphere to a fantastical setting whilst maintaining a serious feel. The game could do with some optimizations as with both Xbox and PC versions have lag spikes during the beginning of cutscenes and in battle, as well as not having too many open choices during the story. Now to wait until episode 2 is Among us.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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