Pre-Review Notes:
Wow, this has been sitting on my blog, unpublished, for ages. I wrote this quite a while back, and only realized it hadn't been published when I went to write something else. A little change to the review format from now on is that most of them will be almost image-free. I'll try to provide an image of the cover, and that'll be about it. This saddens me (I had fun writing the profoundly unfunny captions), but a series of circumstances makes it the smarter thing to do. Occasional reviews may still have images, when I find myself under circumstances that allow it, but these will be rare and far between (As though my reviews aren't that way already). Here goes the review, in the same state I thought I published it about two weeks ago.
So, after my beloved
Walking Dead's first season, the folks at TellTale went on to make a game titled
The Wolf Among Us, based off of the
Fables comic books by Bill Willingham. The entire thing came out, I finally got both the time and the money to play it (which was high priority, considering this is the next game made by the folks what was, until a few months ago, my favorite game), and am now writing about it. I came into
Wolf Among Us with extremely high expectations, seeing how much I loved
Walking Dead, and was afraid my hopes would be dashed much the same way they were when I played
Persona 3. Luckily, they were not.
Now, full disclosure before I begin the review proper: I have not read any of the
Fables comics. I didn't even know of their existence prior to the game being announced, and the only thing I really knew before coming into the game was their very basic premise: characters from fairy tales and fables living in New York, usually magically disguised into human form. According to some forum-posters on the sites I frequent, the game, specifically the last episode, is problematic to the canon of the comics, which annoyed a fair amount of the comic's fans. I am taking none of this into account, and am reviewing
Wolf Among Us as its own piece of media. If you're a
Fables fan, I can't guarantee that this is not a complete mishandling of the license.
Also,
Wolf Among Us is a TellTale game. This means that, for the first time, I'm going to invoke the caveat I wrote in for myself in my review system, all the way back in my very first review. TellTale games put story and presentation way above the gameplay, and the story and presentation of a TellTale game is more important than the gameplay towards ones enjoyment. As such, I'll value the presentation score as 75% of the final score. That said, let us begin.
Presentation:
The Wolf Among Us takes the same "living comic book" look that
The Walking Dead did, but makes it look considerably better. It's simply sharper all around. Characters look more alive and are more expressive. Locales ooze more atmosphere and are just simply better-looking all round. Perhaps this is helped by the aesthetic, which, compared to
The Walking Dead's relatively realistic one, is somewhat more exaggeratedly stylized. The game takes on a strongly defined, very sharp look, without the constant grass and smaller details which tended to cloud
Walking Dead up. This is not to say the game isn't visually detailed, though. Taking place in New York, the game has lovingly crafted graffiti, signs, and even those paper notes with the flappy cut-up telephone numbers at the bottom you find strapped to lamp-posts. These all say something, sometimes subtly related to one of the characters. They're a really nice little detail, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes subtle world-building and I'm upset they often flash by so fast you don't get to look through all of them. It also uses a much more high-contrast color palette, sometimes even going for bright neon colors. The intro sequence at the start of each episode makes particularly strong use of this. In short, the game takes
Walking Dead's already absolutely gorgeous style, makes it crisper, adds more personality, resulting in a mind-blowingly good looking game that'll run on pretty much anything. This is a great example of how much more important aesthetic design is than pure graphical horsepower.
The music helps add to the moody, almost noire, atmosphere. Where
Walking Dead's soundtrack was for the most part forgettable, with only Clementine's theme really standing out,
Wolf Among Us has a magnificent synth soundtrack which manages to bob and weave to fit the mood of next to every occasion perfectly. It manages to be unobtrusive enough that you won't be distracted from the story, whilst still keeping the atmosphere going in the quieter moments and making the fast ones that tiny bit more exciting. The only criticism I can really levy at it is that tracks are re-used a little too much for such a short game. I'm not particularly bothered by this in instances where it makes sense (the music at a bar, or the opening credits theme), but it made me a bit disappointed to hear the same "shit just got serious" track in the last episode that I heard next to the very start of the first.
Now, the real meat of the game is the story. It's what you're playing the game for. You play the role of Bigby Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf, who has taken up the role of Sheriff of Fabletown, in New York City, your main purpose being to prevent the easily riled-up and violent Fables from killing each other. However, a brutal murder forces you out of this role and into a more investigative position. In the process of tracking down the killer, you become involved in a much bigger conspiracy.
In short, it's a detective story. And, if you've read my
Persona 4 review, you'll know I
'm fond of like am a sucker for really fucking adore a good detective story. Especially if I get to be the detective.
Wolf Among Us does "detective story" really well. The plot twists and waves and turns, constantly spitting out surprises, and never feeling stale. The amount of thinking you have to do is disappointingly limited, however, with only a couple real tests of deductive reasoning, spoiled somewhat by the fact that you've got a one in four chance of picking the right answer even with your eyes literally closed, and the correct answers become really evident when you see them, but this is understandable seeing as how it's one of those detective stories that doesn't really give you all the cards to play with until you need them.
What's really clever is how it slowly transitions from detective story to social commentary and critique. The causes of the crimes you're investigating are very deeply seeded into Fabletown's social structure, and this is, as most fiction, a parallel of the real world.
Wolf Among Us gets you to think about it by virtue of its great detective plot, and then uses your momentum to throw you into thinking about very serious real-world stuff. It's clever, and it only really becomes heavy handed in the last fifteen or so minutes before you're thrown into the epilogue. Otherwise, it's a much needed game that talks about more than its own universe.
The Walking Dead was great because of its very emotionally touching story, thanks greatly to a fantastic cast of characters (though, let's face it, Lee and especially Clementine can be attributed great part of the responsibility for this).
Wolf Among Us doesn't attempt to be as touching, but it's still got its fair of emotional impact nonetheless. Unlike
Walking Dead, it makes the tough moments very short, and this leads to a more sudden, more concentrated gut-punch. It's also less afraid to use shocking imagery: Despite how visceral and real
Walking Dead felt,
Wolf Among Us shoves the camera into a position from which it's uncomfortably comfortable to view all the violence, and limits the violence to, for the most part, very visceral things that one could easily see in real life: an axe in the back of someone's head very early on probably being the best example.
Speaking of violence, this is probably where
Wolf Among Us suffers most. At least once an episode, Bigby will get into a fight with someone. The way this happens is usually somewhat contrived, and once the fight is over it typically doesn't move the plot in any respect: Bigby just punches something and is punched back until one of the contestants falls over, and the story then moves forward without much consequence. There are a couple situations where it's handled elegantly, but these are in the minority. A fight that happens in Episode 4 in particular felt very cathartic and was actually one of the events where I felt most connected to Bigby: We were both sick and tired of this guy's goddamn bullshit.
Which brings us to another issue I had. Unlike during that
satisfying fight, most of the time I couldn't really connect to Bigby, not because he was a bad character or badly written, but simply because I didn't really know who Bigby was. I'd imagine he's an important character in the
Fables universe, and quite well defined, but I just didn't know what kind of person Bigby is. Does he grumble about it, but obey orders? Is he a lone wolf (har har har because he's the Big Bad Wolf) who don't take no orders from nobody? Is he an actual asshole, or just a jerk with a heart of gold who will, when it comes down to it, do the more compassionate thing? How violent is he? I couldn't answer any of these questions, and thus had trouble properly roleplaying what I know is an established character. Even
Walking Dead's Lee, an original character, had an obvious personality defined quite fast, and you could just slightly nudge him towards one type of personality or another. With Bigby, I honestly couldn't tell and this lead me to make decisions that didn't quite mesh with one another: I chose what I thought was better for each circumstance, and didn't really follow any rules, which made Bigby seem largely inconsistent, smooth talking someone and then threatening to beat the shit out of the next person.
Now, you could argue this is my own fault, but
Walking Dead managed to make Lee's actions always seem consistent with each other, whilst Bigby can have apparent huge swings in personality from scene to scene. Bigby wasn't a huge impediment to my enjoyment, and what little of his personality does come across made him seem like he might be an interesting character in the comic books, but it's disappointing to see TellTale do with
Wolf Among Us's main character less than with
Walking Dead's, when they had more to work with.
The rest of the cast of characters is fantastic. There's some amazing voice talent, and the characters are lent even more personality by the great facial animation tech. The roster is varied, you meet all types of crazy people, all cleverly adapted fairy tale characters. Snow White in particular I was impressed with: everything about that character was fantastically done across the board. Great voice acting, great animation and great writing for a character going through a great character arc.
The episodic model is still the same as in
Walking Dead. It still has the same flaws and benefits. If you play more than an episode in a row, the "next time on" and "previously on" sections at the ends and beginnings of episodes will frustrate you. I personally played an episode a day, stopping after the "next time on", and it actually made the sections take on the intended effect, that being the same as in a TV show, and I think it greatly improved my experience. I personally recommend taking a similar approach to get the most out of it, but an option to turn the artifacts of the episodic model off , or at least skip them, would be nice in future TellTale games, at least once the whole thing comes out.
Presentation Verdict:
9/10
On a technical level,
Wolf Among Us is better than
Walking Dead, and tries its hand at a genre I'm considerably more fond of.
Wolf Among Us does some very clever things with its story, but also makes a couple missteps that made my experience not quite as smooth as with
The Walking Dead. Despite ultimately coming worse off, I feel it shows more ambition than
Walking Dead, and I can see TellTale surpassing its first massively successful effort by giving something more similar to
Wolf Among Us another bash and perfecting the execution.
Gameplay:
Well, this should be quick.
Most of the gameplay of
The Wolf Among Us is intimately related to its story. The thing you'll be doing the most is choosing conversation options, usually from three spoken options and staying silent. You've got a strict timer to decide what you say, however, and if you don't choose anything you end up staying silent. However, the layout of the conversation options is slightly different. Rather than a list where you scroll up and down and press enter to choose, the options are now in four squares divided into two rows of two squares each. This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, this allows for faster reading of the options, you no longer have to quickly scroll through the list to be able to properly read some of them. On the other, this removes the possibility of choosing options using the number keys, and forces you to use the left and right buttons to choose as well as up and down. This results in it taking a longer time to select what you want, and makes it a bit more fiddly. Several times I ended up staying silent or choosing something different from what I wanted because of this. That said, despite this the timer is still a brilliant addition, forcing you to make split-second decisions that you'll start to regret as soon as you start to hear the answer, and I still think is the best approximation to real-life conversation I've seen.
Now, something that I can't take into account in my final score, simply because I can't confirm it, but I've heard the decisions you make, much like
The Walking Dead are less significant than they seem, and the story only diverges until certain points, at which point it converges and then diverges again. This didn't bother me with
Walking Dead because the choices there gave emotional context. It didn't matter that characters ended up surviving or dying whether you tried to save them or not, the fact that you tried to save them makes a huge emotional difference to you. In a detective plot, however, that's another story. If you are a good detective, you should be able to dismantle the case more bloodlessly than if you're not. Nonetheless, I cannot confirm this, due to only having played through the game once and only planning to play through the game again when I've forgotten enough plot detail that this kind of thing won't bother me. If it holds as true as
Walking Dead, I recommend taking a similar approach: I really regret having re-played
Walking Dead within less than a year of my first playthrough.
The adventure aspect of the game, outside conversation, consists of walking around environments and interacting with items to interact with them. Interacting brings up a small menu where you can choose what to do with an item. You can usually either inspect an item, resulting in Bigby commenting on it, or touch it or pick it up. Very rarely you'll be able to use an item on another item. The puzzles have been toned way down, to the point where I don't think there was anything more complicated than use item A on item B (handily told to you through the interact menu). As much as I wasn't a fan of the puzzles in episode 1 of
Walking Dead, I did miss the much more simplistic but still somewhat thought provoking puzzles of later episodes, and considering this was a detective story I felt they would fit in better here. That said, interaction is simple, and you can get better results if you pay attention to Bigby's comments when inspecting and then reflect that during conversations, which is a nice satisfying way of bringing about the whole detective angle.
The final aspect to the game is the action, and it's also the most boring. Just as I mentioned in presentation, fights are rarely emotionally resonant, and the fighting mechanics don't do much to improve it. It's a series of QTEs. Press a button. Click on a part of the screen. Mash a button until you win. Press another button. It doesn't do any of the clever things
Walking Dead did to relate it to the puzzle gameplay, either, which makes the fighting even less inspiring. The fact that you are a being who is harder to kill the more famous you are, and you just happen to be quite possibly the most famous fictional character of all time doesn't do much to add to the tension, either. This doesn't feel like in
Walking Dead, where a single zombie was terrifying. Bigby always has the advantage, and that reveals the QTEs for the bland, uninspiring thing that they are.
Gameplay Verdict:
5.5/10
Sadly, as much as I want to, I can't give anything much higher than this. The mechanics are functional: They don't add or subtract anything. They're purely there to allow you to experience the story, and they do that well, but it's not them that you'll be remembering. The only thing that puts the game above the average 5 mark is the timer in the conversation system.
Final Verdict:
(9*7.5 + 5.5*2.5)/10 = (67.5+13.75)/10 = 81.25*10 = 8.125
A brilliantly presented game that sadly falls down on its really, really forgettable gameplay. This kind of game is why I put the caveat in my review system that allows me to manipulate percentages. The gameplay really is uninspired, but it really is not the part of the game that is important to your enjoyment. Even if the gameplay mechanics were absolutely fantastically polished and innovative in every way, my enjoyment of
Wolf Among Us would barely change. The fact that they're not was so unimportant to my enjoyment whilst playing the game that I didn't even realize they were mediocre until I sat down to write this review.
Extremely fierce and competitive, this deaf-mute girl is constantly in verbal battle with you, going through a variety of battles of wits, both in act 1 and throughout her route. You are (initially) only able to communicate with her thanks to Misha, a bubbly pink-haired girl who serves as her interpreter, as well as being Shizune's best and only friend. This often creates confusion. Misha is not a romance option, which is something many do not realize, and attempt to romance her. This route deals with problems in communication, and is all about giving as much as you take out of a relationship. I recommend this route as the first you play, unless you choose Lilly's.
Perhaps the strangest and most unique of the girls, Rin is a passionate painter without arms. However, what defines her most is her extremely strange personality, going on weird tangents and generally not making any sense. She's kind of paired with Emi, though not nearly as much as Lily with Hanako or Shizune with Misha. Her route is all about understanding and acceptance in a relationship, and is actually the one that develops Hisao's character the most, which might make it a good idea to do it first, though I would not recommend it, for reasons I'll explain later. Rin's route is also by far the longest, largely due to the dedication to Hisao's character development.
Emi is a cheerful and extremely energetic girl, if slightly childish. She's also the best member of the track team, and is an amputee of both legs. If you recognize the parallel with Rin, you get no points. Rin actually shows up more in Emi's route than viceversa, but she's still a minor presence when compared with Misha in Shizune's route or Lilly and Hanako in each others routes. Emi's route is mostly about running, both literally and metaphorically, and focuses on learning to trust your partner and letting them help you. It's by far the shortest route, Act 4 being practically non-existent. It's also got the lightest tone out of all the routes, and is more sexually charged, but, given Emi's character, it works. I'd call this the worst route, but it is still fantastic.
Hanako doesn't have a defining occupation like the other girls. She is instead extremely shy, to the point of it being a serious issue, and is almost always reading at the library. Her shyness is due to the huge burn scars covering over half her face. Lilly is the only person she has let close. Lilly is very present in her route, and both routes actually hit many of the same plot points, though with significant changes in where emotion is directed and enough small changes to make them feel somewhat unique. The route deals with overcoming your fears, and being supportive of your partner, though it takes a different bend than you'd imagine. It's by far the most constantly emotionally charged route, and has some of the most affecting endings in the game.
In case you hadn't realized, Lilly is Hanako's best friend. She takes care of Hanako, and is the one person who she's let close. She's also the class rep for class 3-3, a class for the seeing-impaired. As one would expect at this point, Lilly is blind. She's by far the calmest of the girls (unless you count whatever Rin does as being calm), and this translates to her route's feel, being slow and chill. This route is primarily centered around drinking tea, but in its spare time deals with the issues and benefits of attachment. Even more than Lilly is in Hanako's, Hanako is an absolutely huge presence in this route, comparable in on-screen time to Misha's presence in Shizune's route, though maybe not quite as plot-central.This is my own favorite route, as well as the first I played, and I recommend either leaving it for last or going for it first.
