The Wolf Among Us (Multi-Platform)
By now it seems a little redundant to point out that fairy tales as, say, collected by the Brothers Grimm were pretty gruesome. In Telltale Game’s The Wolf Among Us, set in a “gritty” (read: dirty, cigarette-addled 1970s-ish) New York City neighborhood populated by fairy tale characters, someone takes an axe to the skull before you even get to the title screen.
About that setting: the game is based on the Vertigo comic Fables which tells the stories of characters who escaped from their world and who now live in Fabletown, a neighborhood in a “real world” New York City (See ABC’s Once Upon a Time for a similar, Disney-branded take on this idea). It’s in a noirish New York, all shadows and saturated colors. The lines are thick and there’s a stillness to the art and animation that feels true to the game’s origins as a comic book.
A lot of the Fables comics are genre fiction set in the fairy tale urban world—Wolf is a murder mystery peppered with references to stories and, I assume, to the comic itself. A lot of what happens messes around with genre standards, but this kind of intellectual genre-combining raises a question: Is the collision of cliches and stereotypes enough to elevate them? Does the slumlord really need to have a working-class British accent? Is mashing the femme fatale into the fairy tale princess into the victimized sex worker doing anything other than finding a way to repackage those ideas? It’s an issue not unique to Wolf or to its source material, the idea that a stack of references is in itself worthwhile.
The Big Bad Wolf is the sheriff of the Fabletown. He goes by Bigby Wolf, and looks quite the frumpled cop with his loose tie and unbuttoned collar. Oh, he’s in human form, so he’s not a giant anthropomorphic dog. Like any detective in this kind of city, he’s guilty about things in his past and trying to make up for them because the city, all its dirt and violence, is a metaphor. For his guilt. About destroying pigs’ houses and eating people.
You walk Wolf around apartment buildings and city streets, reading plaques, talking to people and animals, picking up items. Snow White, assistant to the acting mayor of Fabletown, comes along. She’s the calm to Wolf’s smolder, a blueish tint to her palette complementing his reddishness. She asks a lot of questions and waits for you to decide whether to peek in someone’s door or knock on it.
You do a little library research. During action sequences (fights and chases) you press buttons as they appear on-screen, usually placed in a spot where the image’s composition leads your eye. Sometimes you guide a cursor near a circle before the button you need to press will appear. Sometimes there’s more than one circle, presenting you with a choice: Do I throw the guy onto the metal bed frame or into the sink?
At the beginning of the game it tells you that your choices matter, and that the story tailors itself to them. Without seeing the entire game (this few hours is the first of five episodes), it’s hard to say whether that’s delivered upon in the game’s structure or just more weird choice-as-empowerment marketing that is so videogames. And what does “matter” even mean?
Text will appear in the upper-left hand corner, giving you clear feedback on the effect of your actions. Or, well, sort-of clear feedback: It will tell you if you chose something, or if your interactions with a character had an immediate effect on them (“She noticed your silence” or “He’ll remember that”). You don’t know what the long-term effects of it will be, though, but it’s a particularly gamey kind of foreshadowing, the equivalent of an ominous chord or a lingering cutaway shot.