The Wolf Among Us
Playing Telltale Games’ sleek, comic book-inspired noir
It’s the year 19-something or other, and Sheriff Bigby Wolf has a problem. It all starts when he gets a call from Toad, who’s calling because a man is beating up a woman upstairs. Bigby arrives just in time to separate them: an angry drunk named ‘The Huntsman’, and a mysterious woman. She refuses to give Bigby much information about why she’s there, just says she’ll come by Bigby’s apartment later. And she does, but not the way either of them had in mind. Coming up the stairs of his apartment building at the end of the day, he sees something horrible, something he won’t soon forget. Evidence of a crime that clearly involves the mysterious woman from earlier in the day. A crime that only Bigby might be able to solve…
And so begins the 5-part, gritty, noir mystery The Wolf Among Us, which is one of the best narrative games I’ve played, and comes from the same creative people who adapted The Walking Dead into a game. The player takes on the character of world-weary Bigby Wolf, Sheriff of the dystopian and corrupt world of Fabletown. The time of fairy tales has ended. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and other beloved characters are all living on the lam, disguised as humans in the mundane world. Bigby’s no exception — in the time of fairy tales, he was the Big Bad, the wolf everyone feared. Blower down of houses, menacer of little red riding hoods. Now he’s a fit, shaggy-haired, tie-wearing enforcer for a possibly corrupt government, trying to maintain order in a world rife with menace and corruption. Don’t be fooled by Bigby’s thinly civilized veneer — the wolf still lurks beneath the surface, threatening to burst through Bigby’s human facade at the game’s most dangerous moments. During one early fight, in a foreshadowing of what’s to come, Bigby’s eyes turn yellow, and his teeth sharpen to feral points.
“Your eyes? The teeth? You’re not really supposed to do that, are you?” an observer asks afterwards.
“Not if I can help it,” he says. But as he tries to solve the mystery of these truly gruesome crimes, there are many moments when — faced with brutality, corruption and venality — he can’t help it, and you’re not sure if you want him to. That, of course, is what it means to have a wolf among us.
If curse words, severed limbs and headless prostitutes are not your thing (and whose are they?), this game will be a rough ride for you. It opens with domestic violence, and the characters fling the word ‘fuck’ around so much in the first few minutes that I lost track before the end of chapter one. Yes, the violence is atmospheric, but I’m not sure if it’s gratuitous — this is noir, after all, and the genre skews just to the right of gore. As the sheriff, your choices influence both the visible violence of this world and its internal structure. At several key moments, you have to choose whether characters live or die, as well as whether you want to ‘punish’ them for their crimes by ripping their arms off, tearing their throats out, etc. Most of the characters who might suffer these fates are terrible people — traffickers, thieves, other minor and major abusers. But the game is also making a point: if you choose to punish them, even in the name of justice, you’re breaking the rules too. The title is The Wolf Among Us, and as the player, you’re constantly being asked to decide what justice really means.
The high stakes and morally ambiguous world of Fabletown come from Fables, a wildly popular and successful comic book series. The game’s art pays tribute to these comic book origins, with solid outlines and somber blocked colors. But it also feels modern, and the artists achieve enormous expressive nuance in the characters’ faces and gestures. The script, like that of other narrative games, features extensive non-interactive sections that feel like a movie. Unlike in some other narrative games, these cutscenes are fun. The characters are fascinating and layered — for example, Bigby’s boss and sometime romantic interest — the regal, overwhelmed, idealistic Snow White, now trying to balance her own vicious boss, her desire to do good by the people, and the unending parade of thankless tasks that face any small-town civic official. Snow White is sweet, but she has ambitions, and Bigby has to choose between his feelings for her and enforcing her sometimes brutal dictates. Such is love. Or the Crooked Man — the game’s Big Boss in more than one way — who demands a trial for his crimes in hopes of smooth talking his way out of justice.
I hung on pretty much every word, even when I was deciding what those words were. And while I wish that the game had veered further away from some of its tropes — one scene in particular, featuring a nearly nude woman pole dancing, could have gone the way of the dinosaurs — it feels like a well balanced story that brings depth and originality to its archetypes.
The interactivity in The Wolf Among Us is sharp, too. The dialogue choices are plentiful, although I’m not really sure how the player’s choices influence the plot. (Every so often, the words [X character will remember that] appear at the top of the screen after you make a choice, but it’s unclear whether they actually remember). During combat scenes, the game guides the player with on-screen prompts. Pressing different keys enables dodges, grapples and attacks. But unlike with other combat systems, these fights are scripted, and the game cues what buttons to push at what time. As the player, you still have to move quickly, but these QTEs add to the intensity, advance action, and feel native to what’s actually happening in the story.
All in all, this was one of my favorite video games since Heaven’s Vault. If it didn’t quite reach that level, that’s not the game’s fault — there can only be one Heaven’s Vault — but it’s an impressive transmedia achievement all the same.
