This game has been a long time coming. When I was introduced to this game, it was by a demo on the Playstation 3. I immediately took a liking to the world’s colder tones and the idea that the title was about who we were playing trying to be the good guy and not some monster in the shadows, as well as it being something completely different then anything I had played by Tell Tale back then. I picked the game up soon after in a steam sale, but it would wait several years before I would play it. By this time, the new-ness of the game type had been well over for me, but the world still beckoned.
Story: The day of fables is over. The have been forced to abandon their homelands for our world, and to avoid major issues with the “mundies” who’s world they fled to, they can not simply be the creatures they were there. Rather they need to hide in the open. Those who can pass as other “mundies” do, while others require the use of charms called “glamour” to look the part. Those who can not do at least that are required to live in isolated places where mundies don’t go. But any colony with such requirements also require someone to enforce the rules. And in Fabletown, that enforcer is none other then Bigby Wolf… aka the Big Bad Wolf.
Bigby has been trying to turn his life around and not be the villain he once was anymore, but he has a long way to go before he can gain the trust of the people around him… and tonight isn’t going to help him. Toad, a landlord in Fabletown, called him about a fight in one of the tenant’s apartments. Arriving on the scene, Bigby found the Woodsman there beating up a young lady he had never met before. And while the chaos that ensued between the old adversaries would be costly, it would be nothing compared to the next morning when that woman’s head would be found at the doorstep of his own apartment complex. There is a murderer loose in Fabletown, and a sheriff who’s job it is to find and bring them in!
With this basic concept, the game begins, but as you play through the episodic adventure, this will only twist and turn as more characters get involved as both victims of various crimes (related and otherwise), suspects, witnesses, and even angry government officials at the threat this could be. So who’s the killer and what else has been going on? Well, I don’t really want to say as part of this game is figuring it all out for yourself. What I will say is it is VERY well written and everything here makes sense in it’s own right as well as in the general layout of the world you will be playing in. It all just fits and even the ending is satisfying when you finally reach the conclusion. If you are into detective stories and the concept of the fables living in the real world intrigues you, this is a story you will be happy to have seen from beginning to end.
9/10
Graphics: The Wolf Among us is a game based on a comic series called Fable, and as such the art reflects the drawings style you might expect in a comic book, from the cell-shading style of the art itself to the dramatic angles catching the action of the moment. Even shadows in this game are done by inverting the black used for line-work with the color of the object the shadow is thrown over, making for a nice effect over the entire game.
With this astatic in mind, the game take you through it’s events in a fully 3D rendered world, but with a few distinct cameras as you play. When you have a scene to investigate or navigate, you will do so from a camera that is designed to reinforce your point of view, be it investigating a crime scene (and occasionally getting close to something as you go to look at it), a fight broke out or even just a conversation between friends.
In all cases, the game just oozes style here. When you have to navigate/investigate, the camera will creep around with you, following Bigby’s lead as he makes his way through anything from a cold-storage butcher’s fridge to a hotel room where one of the victims was known to be and everything in between. When you need an action scene, the camera will move smoothly into a more dramatic form, framing the combat (or other events) like you might expect if you were reading the pages of the comic or watching a cartoon based on it.
Simply put this game looks great and I’m hard pressed to think of a weakness to the art or technical display it uses.
9/10
Sound: And like the graphics, the sound here really stands out as something special. From the moment the opening title music starts and shows some noir-class-edge, you know you are in for something special. Unfortunately that special is limited to this and the end credits after each episode as far as music goes, but don’t let that fool you. The game did not lie.
Rather the voice acting is going to carry this game, which makes perfect sense considering how story driven it is. The actors here really got into their rolls and made them believable for their world. But the majority of the time, you will be listening to Bigby interact with others… Snow White in particular as she does her best to help solve the murders going on. But everyone fit well. Even the child TJ (Toad Jr., I imagine) was on his game. And if you’ve seen many child actors, you know how tough that can be to get! Absolutely stunning job!
9/10
Gameplay: Sadly, gameplay is where this game shows it’s limits. Much like another game we have reviewed here previously, The Wolf Among Us is one of Tell Tale Game’s newer style titles. Instead of the traditional point & click adventure games they used to make, this is much more akin to an interactive movie. There will be a few places where you control Bigby as he investigates a crime scene or makes his way through a hallway where the game lets you move him with the WASD keys and potentially click something to interact with it, but this is not most of the game. Nor does the game ever fully adapt to the PC’s keyboard and mouse options, as the interface keeps the four spots to represent the buttons on a modern console controller as the cursor itself for these scenes. Still they are functional and clean, using a circular interface on anything you can interact with keeping everything clear and perfectly understandable regardless of what controls you choose to play with (and this being the PC version you can choose for yourself which you like best). And that is a very important thing to notice, as while these moments are not always common, they are some of the most important for building the story in the game.
But there are two other scene-types that are a lot more common in this game… action and conversation. Action is most of the time a set of quick-time-events which will require you to hit a button as it comes up, hammer a button quick enough to succeed, or even click the target on the screen fast enough to pass. However, there is a little bit more depth here as there are occasions where you will have to use your head and potentially decide you want to fail an event to get a different outcome. For example, there is a bar fight you can completely destroy everyone in there, but… do you actually want to or do you want to just defend yourself and not cause more of a mess? Add to this some events having multiple choices on top of taking none and you do get some genuinely interesting options for sections that in many games are frowned upon.
In addition to this, you will also spend a lot of time talking to other characters, discussing your findings, their findings, personal events, and really where you get to know a lot of them. All conversation choices include a timer allowing you to choose nothing if you desire or feel it is the best course of action. But also because it’s on a timer, you need to decide fast as the others in the conversation will not wait for you (in fact you may have to decide WHILE listening to everyone more often then not).
The end result is an enjoyable experience, but as with the other game mentioned, it’s more like an interactive movie then a game. But this time, it still manages to feel like everything is important more then you are bumbling through everything regardless of how you do. And I could see actions I took in the story take direct hold in how the ending plays out. It’s the least I should expect from a game this entwined in story telling over gameplay by it’s very style.
7/10
Bugs: This game ran almost flawless. I have to say almost however, as the game flat-out crashed to desktop on me once (no error message, though). Thankfully, it did so after finishing the episode, showing me my choices, and saving it as done. I just didn’t get the end credits. But it still happened and needed to be noted.
Overall: Going into this game, I knew I was going to enjoy it. True it was as much movie as game, but it owns this completely, enveloping the player in the plot and environment incredibly well. If you love getting wrapped up in the world and characters that inhabit it, step on in. This game is for you. But if you came in expecting a more classic game-type, you are coming in for the wrong reason. It might still be worth your time, but it’s not going to be what you were looking for.
Score:
8/10
Requirements:
- 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 3 GB RAM
- Any ATi/AMD or NVidia card with 512 MB RAM
- 2 GB hard drive
- Windows XP SP3
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350 (8 cores) running at 4 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- NVidia GeForce 960 GTX with 4 GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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