Delusional Review: The Wolf Among Us

Executive Summary

The Wolf Among Us is very much in the style of the recent Telltale adventure games of the last few years. It's a nearly entirely narrative-driven experience, and if you're not interested in the idea of basically playing a game that is a movie, this (and the rest of the Telltale games since they made The Walking Dead adventure games) probably won't interest you. That said, it's my first experience with the modern Telltale game model, and between the wonderful take on old fairy tales (which is entirely a product of the original comic books the game is based on) and the way the game at least provides a feeling that the player's choices matter even if the ultimate effect is minimal, it was an experience that I loved. The first episode is even available for free on iOS, so if you've got one with a big enough screen, it wouldn't hurt to give it a try, since the controls are actually better on touchscreen.

Basic Explanation

The game is based off of a comic book series called Fables, which is where it gets at least part of its story and lore from. It's set as a prequel to the comic series, apparently, though I have yet to read them. It's a kind of hardboiled look at fairy tales: set mostly in a small neighborhood of New York called Fabletown where all the characters from fairy tales old and new — the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Mr. Toad, Ichabod Crane, Tiny Tim, and a flying monkey from Oz to name a few — have to live and eek out a living in 1980s-era New York. The story is in the style of a detective noir film, with a murder taking place under mysterious circumstances in the first episode and the player, as sheriff Bigby Wolf, has to try and solve the mystery and the ever-expanding web around it as more and more colorful characters get involved.

Mechanics-wise, it's kind of a mixed bag. As a Telltale experience separate from how most dialogue-driven games have historically worked, it's a really interesting game because of how it asks the player to make snap decisions and quick judgements. As a narratively-driven game where the player is given small windows in which to react, the PC controls aren't great, and in both versions I played the few times it gives you the ability to walk around were awful to control.

A More In-Depth Explanation

Though all the episodes are released at this point, The Wolf Among Us is an episodic adventure game which is, as I understand it, mechanically identical to Telltale's earlier episodic hit The Walking Dead. What that means is that the game has a comic-book aesthetic, that it relies heavily on your investment in the narrative, that it dabbles in player choice and the consequences of their actions, and that it forces players to make choices with its timers. I'd like to address each of those points in turn.

The game has a comic-book aesthetic, with angular, stylized character models and sharp shadows. The power of the engine probably isn't great, as there are a number of graphical hiccups and somewhat mood-ruining animations, such as when a faucet is turned on and a solid stream of non-moving water is revealed from inside out rather than top down, or how transformations are always just off-screen and never gradual. The game could stand to look and run a lot better than it does, but at the same time the aesthetic works in its favor, being both based on a comic book series as well as centering on fantastical characters. Due to its limitations, however, it can sometimes be hard to take it seriously.

The game relies heavily on your investment in the narrative, partly because of the graphical problems I mentioned. The game is narratively driven, of course, but if you can't look past the small-ish problems of the game's art and animation, then the narrative may be the only thing to catch your attention. I found the story itself gripping and the murder mystery angle while putting you in the role of detective is a fantastic way of making the player invested, as they consider possible suspects and try making decisions to get them closer to the perpetrator. While it's not an RPG, The Wolf Among Us places the player solidly in the role of sheriff Bigby Wolf and lets the player make choices just like old choose-your-own-adventure books, and that makes it really interesting.

The game dabbles in player choice and the consequences of their actions, even if they are ultimately minimal. Throughout the game, you'll be presented with choices both light and weighty that will trickle down and eventually affect the game later on. Most of these are signaled to the player via small notifications of "he/she will remember that" after an interaction, though other variants can be seen throughout the game. For example, early in episode 1 you're given options on how to discuss the recently-discovered murder with Snow White, who is the administrative head of Fabletown and whom Bigby has a bit of a crush on. You can either confide in her your suspicions, which comforts her that you can solve the case, or be conservative and leave her scared and unsure, which presumably changes your interactions with her later on. These all appear to have the most impact during the later parts of the story, most noticeably toward the end of the last episode, though I won't spoil it by saying how.

The game forces players to make choices using timers, which is what put Telltale on the map (again) several years ago with The Walking Dead. This is what makes this game feel like an interactive movie. Almost every choice, including the very few combat scenes in the game (which are glorified quick-time events), has a short timer attached to it and the game proceeds whether you make a choice or not. It even hides the mouse until you need to make a choice or participate in a scene, so as to not ruin the illusion. Almost immediately you are told "silence is a valid option" and it doesn't let you forget that fact with most of the dialogue options including one set of ellipses to indicate silence, though not necessarily a non-response. Though the game does have explicit failure states and even "game over" screens, for the most part you can put it on and not do anything and the game will happily continue the story for you. That makes it a novel experience if nothing else, as long as you don't consider it against Telltale's other recent releases.

Now, of course, I have to talk about the actual controls. While the game was (I'm assuming) designed for the PC, the nature of the game — with its quick-time fight scenes and the way the mouse only comes out when you're on a timer — makes the actual PC controls less than perfect. It is far too easy to miss a dialogue option or a punching spot when you have to first find your mouse and then position and click (especially since fight scenes often have those punching spots move around as the character does). Playing the first chapter on iOS made it much easier to control, since you can quickly read and immediately tap what you want to respond, rather than having to split your focus on where the mouse is. I felt the action scenes on iOS didn't take me out of the experience as much, either, since they use swipes indicated by arrows rather than showing a computer key on-screen to indicate which way you're dodging or attacking.

That said, neither control scheme can save the few free-roaming sections, which are just awful. In a handful of locations, you're given the ability to roam around, looking for clues and picking up useful things, or maybe talking to people to further your investigation. All of them are categorically awful. There is absolutely no camera control, so you're stuck with whatever camera angle it decides for you, for whatever distance it decides, and then it just jump-cuts to the next camera angle without any indication or movement. When the cut to the next camera angle happens, your direction controls are often switched on you, meaning that you'll star walking in the wrong direction when the camera switches and sometimes you'll end up walking back and forth across the threshold for the camera switch. Both the PC and iOS versions have this problem, and it makes these sections just awful to play, not least because even the "run" button proceeds at the pace just outspeeding a drop of cold honey.

Overall Impressions

The horrible controls definitely mar the title, but still I loved the experience of actually playing through this. Not being familiar with the series that the other recent Telltale games are based off of (Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Minecraft), I think their particular graphical style suits this property best, being actually based on a comic book series. As I said, in comparison to other types of adventure games and narratively-driven games, it's kind of a unique experience, even if Telltale has made themselves known for making this one very specific style of game several times over. I would actually recommend playing it at least once, although perhaps if you like one of the other properties that I mentioned Telltale having made adventure games out of, maybe you'd rather play one of them instead. The Wolf Among Us being a canonical prequel to Fables, it definitely got me interested in the series.

Now let me start off by giving a couple of Disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: While most of this is going to be negative (shocker), you should still play Fallout 4. Because it's Fallout 4. The same way you should play Skyrim and The Witcher 3. Because they are Skyrim and the Witcher 3. These are massive open world games done well enough, and since no one tries to compete with them in their respective niche, they are far above and beyond anything else available even with their faults. <- That all being said, Fallout 4 is not as good as Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and this is going to focus on what it does wrong because anyone who plays those games and liked them probably knows what it is going to do right. You are going to have a massive open world with decent enough exploration and tons of things to do in it that will eat up 100s of hours of your time, and do it reasonably well, if you are interested in playing that kind of game and you can have some fun despite the flaws (like me; I like the game).

Disclaimer #2: I like the Elder Scrolls better. This is because I think the developer is better at making and balancing them, vs their Fallout series.

Disclaimer #3: I've only played the game for 45 hours. Thus I have not seen the entire map.

^ With these out of the way, let's get started.


3) The Game Doesn't Explain Anything

Fallout 4 is absolute complete **** at explaining things that the player NEEDS to know. In fact, it is so bad at this that at least some of it comes across as sheer laziness.

This starts off with perks, and the perk system. The perk system, at its core, is centered around the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. This is fallouts stat system, separated into 7 stats called Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.

The initial problem is that it is not obvious how important the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system is for actual gameplay, and there is no way in game to tell how much of an effect each point in any one of your stats will bring. But the game asks you to allocate most of your points into this system upfront without any "good" way to compensate for mistakes made here later.

Keeping in mind that the game gives you a basic overview of what each stat is supposed to do, at a very high level, my first complaint here is that ... well when you IMMEDIATELY need to allocate 21 points across your stats at the beginning of the game, you have no idea what the **** to do or how important this decision is until you've already done it and experience some of the consequences. And since I'm on my 3rd main (5 characters total to see some of the other effects for myself), I am very pissed that the game asks you to make THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION IN THE GAME upfront, which is how to allocate the vast majority of the stat points you are ever likely to see, without giving you a real in-depth way to figure out, in-game, what the effects of your decisions are until it's way too late to reverse them (I posit that this point, the point where this stuff matters, is found AFTER the last ditch chance to do reallocation).

^ This is compounded by the fact that you NEED to reach certain bars in each STAT to have the option to unlock certain points upon level up. There are 70 level up based perks, one for each level in each stat point, and the game is only going to make 30 of these available to you upfront. Thus it is VERY important to make sure you allocate your points correctly so that you aren't playing with a very bad character. But..... the game doesn't tell you what perks are even available AT ALL until the initial allocation is done, and to be blunt the one-time chance for reallocation happens long before you have any **** way to tell what's a good decision and what isn't. In fact, just to explain how bad this decision is, the game literally asks you this question ONE TIME, and only one time (the question is "Do you want to reallocate your SPECIAL points?") within 2 minutes of even giving you the option to view your perks at all, immediately after a very cinematic "cutscene" in which it is very unlikely that any new player even bothered to look at something that deep in the menu system they just got two minutes ago followed by the epic music.

^ In a word, there is a continuing theme where the game assumes you are anal as **** and google the **** out of everything possible, which does not describe the average person playing it.

But let us move past perks and SPECIAL for a moment. We are out on the wasteland. We just finished the initial series of quests where the game held our hand through Sanctuary Hills, the Red Rocket Truck Stop, Concord, and the Museum of Freedom. It is now time to EXPLORE. And the only directions we have are to get to Diamond City. Well there are two problems here:

A) The game doesn't tell you a good way to get there.
B) The game doesn't explain that going there is an absolutely horrid idea in the first place and that the main story has large difficulty spikes between missions after this point to encourage exploration between them (or really just because the people making the game were lazy).

So um...... my first tip of advice to a new player is to not go to Diamond City. That is a terrible idea and should not even be considered early in. That covers our number 2). The number 1) is our point number 3) (partially), so that will be covered later. But since this partially falls under 5) as well I would like to **** about it here too.

Another area where this annoys the **** out of me is crafting. There is no way to tell what is valuable and what is common trash until you need a rare component and you KNOW you need it. Since the game has an equipment weight system that gets in the way of this whole thing (partly under 4) ), this makes crafting a giant pain in the ***. The same for settlement building, and generally anything at else that requires obscure junk you've seen about 100 times now but never knew to pick up because you have a big space budget and you didn't know you would need it.

^ Speaking of, the game's tutorials suck. There are several things such as settlement building where some things are never adequately explained, and even the game's controls have basic issues that annoyed the **** out of me because I had to keep googling how to do X. When your game repeatedly forces you to google how to do basic actions because there is no way to reasonable figure out how to do it except random button presses, prayer, and a hope that eventually the game will get tired and finally give you that tutorial message (never happens btw); well... it's just a little bit annoying. I am sure that everyone who had to google how to take off power armor agreed with this statement at some point.

Um.... and I can keep nitpicking and complaining for a while. My point here is that the game really needed to explain a large number of its systems more, and I'm always pissed when anyone uses the fact that google exists as a major crutch in their game design.

Moving on.....

No um... one last thing. The game did not warn me that one of my settlements was being attacked, because the game didn't tell me to listen to X radio station 24/7 for just such an occurence, so now everyone in one of my settlements died, I've lost a **** merchant, and all of it was "preventable" if the game had a better way to warn people of this crap or at least told you to tune in to the **** radio every once in a while. **** you game.

Okay.... moving on.


2) Their is too much **** available to pick up in the game, and you need too much of it.

First things first, this is not that "realistic". But you can literally pick up and find SOME use for EVERYTHING that isn't a massive piece of furniture. The problem is that the vast majority of this is common as dirt and you have a carry weight limit, so the vast majority of this is complete useless **** you cannot afford to pick up. Since there seems to be EXTRA of it in this game because reasons, this means it is literally just there to clutter up the environment, make it stupidly hard to click on exactly what you want at various intervals, and annoy the **** out of anyone who would normally be a pack rat but can't because of the carry weight.

On the flip side, there is so much you need to pick up anyways in this game because some resources are rare and the game doesn't give you enough healing items to not pick up every single type of meat known to man in the hopes that it will be useful someday. Again, because you have a carry weight, this forces a lot of "hard" and unfun decisions that make the game less enjoyable.

On top of this, the game doesn't bother to explain this but sometimes, if you leave an object in a container unattended, there is a small chance that it will get stolen depending on the container. There is also a chance that if you leave your power armor unattended someone will walk off with it. While it's possible to find the culprit.... really? Why did this need to be a thing? To drive me even more crazy than normal? So now I not only have to micromanage the **** out of my inventory, but I have to go on a treasure hunt every time I decided to leave something lying around for too long? And the game never warned me of this? REALLY GAME? REALLY? <- This complaint brought to you by the good people who have googled "Where the **** did my power armor go?" Um.. it's more minor than I make it sound, but it's just insult added to injury here to be honest.

Which brings us to our main point. The thing at the heart of the issue. CARRY WEIGHT. Why did this need to be a thing? In a game where you can pick up and carry so much of the environment, couldn't we FOR ONCE just have had this NOT be a thing in the name of FUN? So many problems with the game could be completely removed by not having this in there, and while yes it might introduce other issues, it would have been worth it to let people carry around whatever they want. Since it's hard as **** to actually sell off any inventory, especially any valuable inventory, and you can already carry so much in the game that it's weight system is too unrealistic anyways, I am just constantly annoyed by this system which has basically been poorly shoehorned into the game in the name of "realism" and/or less memory dedicated to remembering the player's inventory.

Moving on.....

1) The Game's Difficulty Varies Too Much by Area

Um... the thing that annoys me the most about fallout 4 is that unless you are actively consulting a map, you have no idea which directions to travel in, how hard the area over there is going to be, etc. This repeatedly leads to you getting stuck in deep **** that the game really should have, at a minimum, warned you was a bad idea to try that early into a run.

But.... well that would KIND of be excusable, since most of the areas in the game are at least SOMEWHAT the same difficulty as the ones very close to them, except for one thing. And that is that tons of early game quests directly ASK AND ENCOURAGE you to directly wade into deep **** that you are almost certainly not ready for. Even the main quest does this, when it asks you to go to Diamond City. This is ... this is just a problem with Fallout 4 that shouldn't even exist as a problem. It's not okay. And it is just bad design.