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The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 – Faith Review for Xbox 360

The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 – Faith Review for Xbox 360

Meet the Big Bad Wolf

What do you get when you mix Dick Tracy, Phoenix Wright, and a book of fairytales? Welcome to The Wolf Among Us , Telltale’s newest cinematic adventure game set in the universe of Fables . Like Telltale’s previous award-winning series, The Walking Dead , The Wolf Among Us is far more concerned with its story and your role in it than its gameplay. But don’t think that the game is just The Walking Dead with a coat of Fables paint over the zombies. It’s really a beast of a whole different variety, with a completely different aesthetic and tone and a far different role for the player to play.

For those of you who don’t know, Fables is a graphic-novel series that takes famous storybook characters and gives them a much darker twist. Everyone from Red Riding Hood to Ichabod Crane has been exiled from their homelands due to a powerful invader called The Adversary. They have taken up residence in a small community in the lower-east side of New York. Using magic, they conceal their storybook nature from us mundane folks, or “mundies,” and just try to live their lives. Unfortunately, a New York filled with storybook characters is still New York, and the Fables themselves still have a lot of grudges and baggage left over from the old days. So it’s not all that strange for theft, murder, and all manner of seedy business to take place in Fabletown, and that’s where you come in.

You play Bigby Wolf, Fabletown Sheriff. In case the name pun wasn’t clear to you, Bibgy is the Big Bad Wolf in human form. He’s kind of a loner and a hardass, and it’s up to him, i.e., you, to keep the citizens of Fabletown in line both through his powers of deduction and his ability to rip your arm off and beat you with it if you cross him one too many times. On a routine call to Mr. Toad’s house (where he has to berate Mr. Toad for not keeping up payments on his human form… again), he notices his old rival The Woodsman beating up a prostitute and breaks up the fight, but when the prostitute’s severed head shows up on the steps of what is essentially Fabletown city hall, it’s up to you to figure out who did it.

The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 - Faith Screenshot

The Wolf Among Us controls practically identically to The Walking Dead . You have a cursor controlled by the right analog stick or mouse, and you use it to interact with areas of interest. Your actions are limited to four basic choices: look, touch, talk, and (use item) or some other contextual command. On the console, each of these commands are mapped to a face button, and usually only one or two are available when you hover over something with your cursor, but you’d be surprised as to how many options this gives you. Every item of interest is very clearly highlighted by the game with a set of crosshairs, so you’ll never get stuck pixel-bitching and trying to find that one slightly camouflaged item that you need to proceed.

The Wolf Among Us plays out a lot like a murder mystery. Pretty much the entirety of episode one is spent examining crime scenes, questioning witnesses, chasing down suspects fleeing the scene of the crime, and beating up thugs that get in your way. The game will actually ask you to task your powers of deduction as you catch people in lies and tie pieces of evidence to suspects. Unfortunately, there are a few sequences where you have to examine a particular thing to move the story forward, and this can leave you frustrated and stuck at times; the scene in the Mayor’s office involving the magic mirror being one of the worst examples, but this doesn’t happen too often.

The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 - Faith Screenshot

The story’s murder-mystery nature actually puts you in somewhat of a more passive role than in The Walking Dead . Bigby is an observer trying to piece together a crime, not one of the last survivors of humanity trying to make everyone get along. So it doesn’t feel like you are risking anything when you tell the punks that give you a hard time to piss off. There are choices you make that alter the way the story plays out, but these choices are more telegraphed, being punctuated by slow-motion zoom-ins that prompt you to choose between two suspects to chase or two crime scenes to investigate. It’s still well put together, and you do feel like your choices have an impact on the story, but these impacts are less constant and in your face than they were in The Walking Dead . In short, your choices aren’t fleshing out the world you are in, just what happens within it.

The biggest change to the gameplay system comes in combat. Once again, fighting someone is usually just a series of quick-time events. However, this time around, these quick-time events have their own choices embedded in them. For example, if you have The Woodsman in a full nelson, you’ll be given several different points you can mouse over/press the right/left trigger on. Choose a bar, and you’ll slam his head into it. Choose a couch, and you’ll try to tackle and subdue him in a more peaceful manner. What you do in combat later affects how characters treat you in the game, which is interesting because the choices here have to be made with split-second timing, so they are really more instinctual than anything else.

The graphics of The Wolf Among Us are amazing. It utilizes the same cel-shaded, half-cartoony look The Walking Dead does, which makes the whole game feel like a living comic book. However, unlike The Walking Dead , the color scheme of The Wolf Among Us is bright and vibrant, coating the night with dark purples and coloring streetlights an almost neon yellow. This punctuates the storybook nature of the narrative while still managing to make the game feel like it is taking place in a seedy corner of New York City.

The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 - Faith Screenshot

The voice acting is perfect. Bigby sounds just like he should, a tough guy with an unfortunate heart of gold that gets him in trouble. The cockney British accents of characters such as Mr. Toad do a lot to make these Fables feel like real fairytale characters, so it only drives home the narrative’s dark tone harder when they whimsically tell you to go “f%$k off, cop.”

The only thing that kind of bothered me was the game’s representation of Snow White. In the comic book, Snow White is a hardass that has taken on just about every situation without faltering. She actually spoke the line, “I’m Snow White. I’m never outgunned,” before having a dragon put down a terrorist rebellion. But in the game, she seems very unsure of herself. She stumbles over her words and is a complete pushover to her superior, Ichabod Crane. While this is a prequel to the events of the graphic novel, Snow White was a badass from the second she stepped foot in New York, so this portrayal of her character seems rather inaccurate. It’s only due to a strange twist at the end of The Wolf Among Us that I think this strange character portrayal may make sense somehow… but I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, anyone who hasn’t read the graphic novels won’t find the same issue.

The Wolf Among Us feels a lot different than The Walking Dead . It feels a lot more “gamey.” You have a clear goal: find the murderer, and you are constantly making your way toward that goal. This reduces the focus on interpersonal relationships and instead shifts the focus to dramatic, world-defining events, which works just fine for the subject matter. The Wolf Among Us is a fantastic adaptation of the Fables source material, and everyone should at least check out episode 1. Once again, the team at Telltale shows us that they know what makes a narrative great. Just don’t expect this game to be The Walking Dead part 2. As I said before, it (and Bigby) is a whole other animal.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.5 Graphics
Somehow, Telltale even managed to make the faces of pigs and frogs expressive and emotive. 3.5 Control
The console controls leave something to be desired, if only because of the dual-analog setup, but the PC controls work just fine. 4.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The soundtrack expresses a dark and moody tone while still having fairytale elements like flutes and chimes. It’s incredibly well done. 4.0 Play Value
I can’t wait to see what episode 2 has in store. 4.2 Overall Rating – Great
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • The Book of Fables – unlock important character descriptions and histories as you play the game.
  • Online Choices – compare the choices you make over the course of the game to the choice everyone else has made.
  • Non-linear Narrative – make choices that drastically change how the story plays out.

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