Game Review: The Wolf Among Us - Among Good Games

A long awaited review of The Wolf Among Us, a game by TellTale, the lovely bunch that brought us The Walking Dead… the good one. With that intro out of the way, let’s discuss the game. 

Wolf Among Us is TellTale’s attempt at making a game off another property. This time it’s DC and Vertigo Comics’ Fables series, focusing the attention on the adventure/mystery surrounding a string of murders in Fabletown to be solved by Bigby Wolf (aka the Big Bad Wolf). Throughout the adventure you meet various other Fable characters like Snow White, Beast, some scared little prick from the Headless Horseman story, and a bloke known as the Jersey Devil. I’m not particularly familiar with all of them, but I have heard of a fair portion of them before.

They mystery? Two working-girls are murdered in Fabletown and Bigby has to find who did it and why. Clues will throw you into the wrong direction, people will question your judgment and authority time and time again. You won’t be able to make everyone happy, regardless of the decisions you make. But you aren’t there to make people happy. Your goal is to keep them safe and dispense justice when wrongdoing occurs. At least, that’s how I played my game.

Throughout the story, you’ll learn about Fabletown and slowly get more invested in the plight of the people as you progress. You’ll experience the divide among the people between the wealthy and the impoverished. You’ll see that both side of the fence have their fair share of corruption. You’ll think you know the answer and have everything figured out only to be surprised when things take a hard left and you’re left wondering what’s next. As far as a mystery goes, it’s actually not as predictable as I first expected, which is basically what you want in a good mystery. Something that seems obvious, but when you start to dive in, you find there’s more at work than initially expected.

I will admit that even by the end of Chapter four, I was having trouble getting myself to care about MOST of the characters. There were plenty that annoyed me (Colin or Frog) and some that just kept getting in the way of progress (Woodsman or the Tweedles). But once chapter five unfolded, I started to care because I got to see just what kind of problems they were dealing with. I got to speak to them more directly and about problems that (for me anyway) actually mattered. Not to mention that you have an interesting boss fight in this game, which we really haven’t seen before in TellTale’s more recent games (can’t say for the older ones).

Gameplay wise, I encountered a few glitches like dialogue not appearing in the choice icons, requiring me to close the game and restart, forcing me to pick up at the last checkpoint. Or another glitch in which the audio just stopped working entirely in the middle of a scene (no idea what caused it). I opened the menu and went back to the game and it worked again (didn’t expect that to actually work). It’s a good thing I had subtitles on so I had an idea of what they were saying or I would have gone into that choice completely blind. Oh, and speaking of which, I recommend turning subtitles on. I can handle understanding MOST British / British-like accents, but that coupled with the aforementioned glitches and some characters talking like they have a mouth full of taffy make it difficult to tell what the fuck they’re saying otherwise. Also the volume of some of the voices are just too quiet in comparison to everything else, adding another layer of difficulty to just understanding the dialogue.

Visually, the game is beautiful. It’s like a motion comic, but plays like a movie instead. The colors pop and accent the designs of the world to make everything stand out and look impressive. It’s definitely a departure from the dull colors of Walking Dead (though that makes sense given the drastically different tones between the two games). The music is also quite the treat as well but I really don’t have much more to say about that.

But let’s get the bugbear out of the room. How does this compare to the last big, spectacular game that TellTale made, Walking Dead Season 1 (Season 2 doesn’t count solely because it isn’t finished)?

That’s a difficult question. Like I said, I was more invested in the characters in Walking Dead and from earlier in the story, but that’s because I was charged with their well-being in a cold, ruthless, lawless world where you have to fend together to survive, or become a monster yourself just to get by. Wolf Among Us puts you at a greater distance from the characters your charged to protect because you really aren’t supposed to be emotionally invested in their lives. You’re the sheriff and it’s your job to uphold the law, not be everyone’s friend and keep the lot of them happy.

Wolf Among Us is more visually interesting and has more varied elements of gameplay, allowing it to do more than what Walking Dead has traditionally offered. However this trade off means the characters aren’t quite as fleshed out because we don’t get AS much time with each one to learn all about them and the narrative suffers a bit because it’s all about the mystery and, again, not about the characters or establishing the fucked up world. But I think that’s because Wolf Among Us is aimed more at the audience that already reads the comic, Fables, which means they’d already have some working knowledge of this world and the characters. And, you know what, that’s sensible. Who am I to say they’re doing it wrong when I’m clearly the new guy in the room?

Wolf Among Us is, in fact, good. It’s not the stellar breakaway hit that Walking Dead became and certainly won’t be winning the same mountain of accolades. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s good, has great intentions and is capable of doing some impressive things visually and narratively. It knows what it’s trying to be and knows who is going to play this kind of game, allowing it to stride forward in confidence as it proceeds to give us a hook for a sequel at the very end, those coy sons of bitches. If you want to play some Telltale while waiting for your Walking Dead Season 2 fix, I would recommend Wolf Among Us as it certainly hits all the marks necessary to be an interesting and fun game. If you don’t read Fables (like me) don’t expect to come out absolutely loving this game, but you can probably still find a good sense of enjoyment out of it, regardless.

That’s all for the review. Tune in later this week for some more fun articles. If you have suggestions, leave comments or hit me up with messages. Feedback is always appreciated and encouraged. See ya next time!