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Posted on: October 27th, 2013 No Comments

“The Wolf Among Us” gives player agency


Less than a year after the final episode of its wildly successful take on “The Walking Dead” universe, Telltale Games returns with another promising adaptation in “The Wolf Among Us.”

Based on the “Fables” comic books, “The Wolf Among Us” depicts a world where classic fairytale characters known as Fables have been exiled from their homelands and are forced to live in secret among normal people unaware of the existence of Fables. Taking up residence in a grimy Manhattan neighborhood, the community they form is known as Fabletown.

You play as the Bigby Wolf, reformed from his days as the Big Bad Wolf and sheriff of Fabletown, tasked with protecting its fairytale denizens. When a Fable is brutally murdered, Bigby sets out to uncover the shadowy machinations of Fabletown’s most troubled quarters.

Emphasizing choice and consequence, “The Wolf Among Us” effectively imbues the player with agency over the narrative’s progression in a manner much akin to a choose-your-own-adventure book. Visiting various locales from a dilapidated tenement run by a three-foot toad on the edge of town to Snow White’s gothic administrative office at Fabletown’s upscale center, the game ushers the player through guided interactions with the environment and the characters that inhabit them in search for clues, which may in turn be used to catch a character in a lie or expose the location of a suspect.

Telltale touts that the story is tailored by how you play. This is true to the extent that there are plenty of scenarios in “The Wolf Among Us” that pose difficult questions to which there aren’t any easy answers. Still, the player is never truly free to deduce the outcomes of the story by merit of intuition, diverting instead to the master detective in Bigby Wolf to surmise his way into the next scripted set piece. This is a minor gripe, however, because what Telltale does so well with its limited means still amounts to an enrapturing piece of interactive storytelling.

As the first of five episodes, “Faith” is a fine beginning to what’s shapeshifting up to an extraordinary mystery.

amaeche@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

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