The Wolf Among Us - Impressions

Coming from a long background of playing adventures games through the years, all the back to Gabriel Knight and the Monkey Island series, through to Myst & Broken sword, the point-n'-click genre has been a huge part of my gaming life. Naturally the key ingredient that acts as the glue for these games (Perhaps less so for Monkey Island since they're created on a foundation of puzzle solving over storytelling) is the characters and the world they inhabit and shape as the games progress. The Wolf Among Us carries on what has gone before from the point-n'-click genre by taking what was great about those games, and working them into a pre-existing world taken from the 'Fables' series of graphic novels in which famous fantasy tales characters are living out lives inside a seedy, Noire-esque city filled with rich and vibrant and locations, but at the same time still maintaining the impression that this world is very much an unpleasant place to be in. I won't be going into spoilers or story specifics since I've already had many earlier plot-threads spoilt for me, as well as returning characters from previous episodes and cliffhangers. Instead, I want to focus on how I feel about the game after playing through the initial set of episodes, and why I think TellTale Games might have tapped into a series more tightly focused than The Walking Dead or the abortive Back To The Future games.

Of course, every story needs a hero, and here we're introduced to Bigby Wolf, formerly the Big Bad Wolf and the sheriff of Fabletown, the setting and focus for the story. As a rule of adventure game protagonists, you're on a fixed perspective, you're playing through their eyes and looking out, the decisions they're making don't reflect your personal ones in how you'd handle situations and events. What Telltale Games do brilliantly is allow you to break free of these chains and place you inside the character and define what kind of person they become, and who they influence and how; You aren't seeing the world through their eyes, you're directly altering the narrative to a degree that makes you feel as if you're having a impact on the world Telltale have set up. This becomes apparent through the many choices and conversations you make through the story, of which there are many, and very rarely ever seen black and white. There never is a right or wrong decision, but only because the game doesn't allow such a thing to take place. Whether you feel a choice was correct is something you have to look at yourself and wonder in that situation, is if that is how you would deal with such a thing. It's a fantastic study in world influence and shaping a character that reflects you as a person, and it was done, I feel better in The Wolf Among Us vs something like Mass Effect where decisions..never really felt as if they carried a great deal of weight, but purely because I didn't feel as I resonated with those characters and events taking place - Note I only finished the first two games in the series, and given the backlash against the third game, I find myself hard pressed to go back and finish that trilogy off.

Overall I feel TellTale Games have a winner on their hands here. After three episodes, I can safely say I'm comfortable with this being one of my GOTY candidates, based purely on the writing and the design of the world. I haven't touched on the puzzles for good reason - this game doesn't rely on them or indeed punctuate them in a way that would come across as jarring or frustrating. You simply locate a item, and on nearly all occasions so far, the puzzle solution is within a few feet away. This pulling back off the puzzles and focusing more on the narrative I feel is where the series is at it's best, when you let the puzzle elements take a step back in favour of what TellTale does best, you end up with something more cohesive and tighter than your average point and click adventure game.