I continue to be impressed with the new life they’ve breathed into the genre, distilling its traditional ingredients into something more tense and dynamic than the point-and-clicks of my youth. Telltale knows what they’re doing when it comes to storytelling, and The Wolf Among Us is fine proof of that.

I’m fairly certain this is the first time an adventure game has given me the option to throw somebody into the side of a sink.ĭespite the reservations I hinted at, the quality of this game can’t be called into question. Forgotten stories and discarded people are the spotlight themes here, and I foresee a lot of heaviness in the episodes ahead. There are laughs, thankfully, but they’re as rough and sticky as the counter of a dive bar. Like the comics, this game does a brilliant job of pairing childhood fictions with grim grown-up realities.

This is a bloody, sometimes brutal crime thriller, complete with angry slums, lonely souls, and no end of neon and cigarettes. Don’t be mislead by the presence of fairytale characters - there is nothing cuddly about this story. (A friend who has not read the comics described the game as “like Once Upon A Time, if it was on HBO” - which made me laugh, as my exact words when I first saw OUAT were “oh, it’s Disney-fied Fables.”) The player is cast as Fabletown’s sheriff, Bigby Wolf ( get it?), out to solve a grisly whodunnit that’s sure to get worse before it gets better. For the uninitiated, here’s Fables in a nutshell: Characters from legend and folklore, forced out of their homelands by war, are settled in modern-day New York City, doing their damnedest to blend in.

The wolf among us episode 1 ending