Developer: Telltale Games
Publisher: Telltale Games
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS Vita, PS4, iOS
Tested on: PC
The Wolf Among Us – Review
The Wolf Among Us is from the creators of the critically acclaimed the Walking Dead Season One and Two, namely Telltale Games. The interactive thriller is based on the Fables comic book series from DC Comics and Vertigo and introduces many characters we’ve all heard about during our childhood in a different and darker setting.
Story
The storyline takes place years before the events first seen in the first issue of the Fables comic book series. In The Wolf Among Us, the player crawls into the skin of Bigby Wolf who has been assigned as a Sheriff of Fabletown. When a strange murder occurs in Fabletown, you are requested to solve the case before more bad things can happen to the Fables. Just when you think you have it all figured out, another Fable gets brutally murdered and the plot thickens. I’m not going to mention much more about the storyline as that would mean I need to spoil many mind-blowing plots but I can say that the ending will leave you dumbfounded.
However, I can mention that The Wolf Among Us is split into five episodes. Due to this, the story can build up at a nice slow pace. The first episode gives you the chance to familiarize with the characters. It is also a perfect base for anyone that is unfamiliar with the Fables and their history, or at least their darker histories not mentioned in the fairytales we grew up with. The next four episodes focuses more on the storyline rather than the Fables themselves which is perfectly fine as it speeds up the storyline somewhat.
Graphics
Those who have played The Walking Dead series from Telltale Games will be familiar with the visual design of their latest games – a cartoonish comic style. As The Wolf Among Us is based on the Fables comic books, the overall graphics are dark with over saturated, textured visuals. Telltale Games did a brilliant job with recreating the atmosphere found in the comic books themselves. The cartoon-styled graphics seem to become the normal standard for these types of games but The Wolf Among Us remains to be incredibly detailed when it comes down to the surroundings – leaving nothing up to your imagination. In a way you could look at The Wolf Among Us as an animated movie although it acts more like an interactive comic book.
Sound
The voice-acting in The Wolf Among Us is absolutely brilliant. You can really sense the dreaded and raw emotions of all characters when they converse and this ensures that the player is pulled in the story. Since the setting and storyline is rather dark, fighting scenes are bound to happen and when they do you are blessed with the sounds of cracking bones and uncensored swear words. Those that are light-hearted may squirm when hearing these sounds but it truly adds power to the fighting scenes and the overall atmosphere.
Gameplay
The gameplay of The Wolf Among Us is similar to that of The Walking Dead series. Whenever you are given free reign to explore your surroundings, you can move around with the WASD-keys. These control settings cannot be changed however. Your mouse acts as an action-button. Of course, if you’d rather play with the controller, you can do so. As The Wolf Among Us acts as an interactive comic book, you will be mostly sitting around and choosing which dialogue is about to happen as you are given four options but often enough you are blessed with a fighting scene that happened so quickly that you can barely register what is going on before it is too late. Having good reflexes is certainly a must have unless you don’t mind dying multiple times in one scene. Some fighting scenes are to be expected but some are not and this causes the player to sit at the edge of their chair. It is noticeable that these fighting scenes are not evenly spread out in the episodes but in general this didn’t bother me.
The dialogues are a huge part of the gameplay as you are given four options to choose from while time is ticking. Both the dialogue options you are given as the overall action buttons are somewhat the same of these from The Walking Dead – although they have been altered in a positive way. For example, you can easily see what button to smash rapidly while this wasn’t the case before. This is certainly a step-up in the right direction. Most of the choices will feel significant enough to impact the rest of the game but this generally isn’t the case at all which does feel like a shortcoming. Personally, I felt like the choices that had the most impact on the ending of the game happened during the last episode – note that this is not necessarily a bad thing but it is an observation. Because there are different dialogues and actions you can take, there are alternate endings. All-in-all every episode should be finished in two hours, meaning that there is about ten to eleven hours of gameplay. However thanks to the alternate endings, there is some replayability if you want to explore these.
Conclusion
There is nothing truly bad I can say about The Wolf Among Us as it had left me hooked from the start till the end – which also left me sitting like a fool with an open mouth. Both the visual and the audio design in the game are brilliantly executed with voice-acting that many games can only dream of having. The Wolf Among Us is a very specific genre however so if interactive books, where you can only do actions when told, is nothing for you than this game shouldn’t be on your list. Those that can never get enough of this rather rare video game genre should definitely pick it up.
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