Over a few years and a lot of intellectual properties, developer Telltale Games has honed its aptitude for creating player-guided, story-driven games, culminating with last year’s critically acclaimed series, The Walking Dead. Now it has introduced player agency to a different comic series, Fables, which proves to be an uneasier fit. The bold artistic style and lively characters bring creator Bill Willingham’s world to life vividly, but supplying you with control over a sturdy personality on this rich universe has a diminishing effect on both.
I own the primary trade paperback within the comic series, titled Fables: Legends in Exile. It have been many years since I’d read it, but if i began playing The Wolf Among Us, all of it came flooding back to me. The basis: colorful characters out of fables and fairy tales had been forced out in their magical homelands and now live in modern society. Bound together in a secret community, they have to face the worries of mundane life in addition to a couple of challenges unique to them; nonhuman folks must constantly maintain a costly glamour spell with the intention to appear human, lest they be sent upstate to the farm where conditions are lower than desirable.
It’s an immediately intriguing setting, one which drew me in as effectively within the comic because it does within the game. Affinity for beloved characters from my childhood mixed with empathy for his or her unhappy exile and made me yearn to benefit all i may about their plight. The Wolf Among Us is quick to introduce a very good example: Mr. Toad. Once the quirky, wealthy owner of the stately Toad Hall, Mr. Toad is now the owner of a run-down tenement house that may be currently playing host to a violent domestic dispute. His brusque cynicism speaks volumes about his change of fortune, and there is an undeniable charm in having an adversarial conversation with a cranky, bipedal toad.
As the large Bad Wolf (call him “Bigby”), you’ve an element to play during this dialogue. You are the Fabletown sheriff, and you’ve got to reply to the ruckus in Toad’s building, but not before confronting him about his conspicuous nonhuman appearance. Whether you give him a tough time or let it slide this time is as much as you, and you may choose your dialogue responses from among four choices (one among that’s usually to stay silent). To maintain things moving, you’ve a limited period of time to decide on your response before the scene moves on, and this may urge you to be just a little more instinctual together with your choices, rather than letting you carefully deliberate so long as you want.
Dialogue choices are the thrashing heart of the gameplay experience inside the Wolf Among Us. By taking a considerable degree of control over Bigby’s lines, you’re taking on an active role in shaping his character and, by extension, the tale. Having a component to play within the story makes you an active participant and is supposed to make you more invested within the characters, events, and world of the sport. Many narrative-heavy games was immensely enriched by the sort of investment, including Beyond: Two Souls, which I had finished several days earlier and located utterly engrossing. Telltale’s previous tales have benefitted greatly from giving the player control through choice, however the Wolf Among Us is poorer for it.
Instead of feeling like i used to be molding my very own character within the game, I felt like i used to be diminishing a personality from the comic book.
So why did this system work so wonderfully with The Walking Dead yet falter here? The variation and the disconnect lie within the nature of the protagonists. Within the Walking Dead, you played as Lee Everett, a personality created specifically for the game adaptation of the comic series. Though his past is eventually fleshed out, he begins the episodic series as a largely blank slate. This leaves loads of room for his character to develop and, more importantly, lots of room a good way to create his identity. With each choice you’re making, you’re claiming parts of Lee’s personality for yourself and becoming more invested in his struggles.
The same is correct for Bigby Wolf; with each choice you’re making, you’re claiming parts of his personality for yourself. However, while playing as Lee is like filling a job, playing as Bigby is like taking one over. With every dialogue choice, you’re imposing your personality on a powerful character; Bigby has a depressing past that he has tried to flee in his new life, and the struggle between his reformed attitude and his true nature is a gripping one. It isn’t that any of the dialogue options feel wildly out of character, because they do not, and the pointy writing throughout strikes an exceptional grim tone with several welcome beats of levity.
Rather, the difficulty is that during shaping Bigby’s responses, i truly just desired to know what Bigby would do other than choosing myself. By choosing sympathetic, indifferent, or harsh options, I felt like i used to be shutting off other parts of his personality that could be truer or more interesting than those i used to be choosing. Bigby’s strong persona was already well established on this world, and that i felt like an outsider. Rather than feeling like i used to be molding my very own character inside the game, I felt like i used to be diminishing a personality from the comic book.
This feeling nagged me within the game, but i used to be still desperate to see this primary of 5 planned chapters through to its conclusion. Encountering other characters, just like the boozy flying monkey or one of many three not-so-little pigs, was a typical treat, and interacting with the hard-working Snow White and the hard-drinking Woodsman left me much more sympathetic than I’d been firstly. Bigby’s investigations result in some startling discoveries and hint nicely on the conflicts to come back (though how much those conflicts diverge from arcs within the comic series, i could not say). With strong dialogue and engaging characters, The Wolf Among Us tells a stimulating tale.
There are spikes of action in addition that lend some extra drama to the proceedings and offer provocative peeks at what happens when Bigby lets his claws pop out. These scenes rely entirely on those double-edged swords: quick-time events. While these scripted skirmishes are exciting and nicely choreographed, the huge button prompts are likely to draw your attention far from the action, though one kind of prompt does counteract this by making you examine environmental elements. Beyond: Two Souls had similar fight scenes, but in preference to searching for a prompt, you needed to take your directional cue from the protagonist’s body language by paying close attention to the dramatic action occurring. I felt invigorated as I closely watched my character’s movements, while inside the Wolf Among Us, I felt enervated as I waited for the on-screen prompts.
Certain conversations were also plagued with a similarly draining mechanic. Intermittently, the sport displays a message inside the corner of the screen informing you the way a personality reacted to something you said or did. Lines like “Snow White remains skeptical of you” or “Toad will do not forget that” are supposed to be teasers of consequences to return, but they feel like placeholder captions for sentiments that are supposed to be expressed through animation or dialogue. The Wolf Among Us conveys a number emotion during the natural flow of the sport, making these messages stand out like such a lot of sore thumbs.
After the few hours it took to finish this chapter, I wasn’t certain I how I felt about playing the following chapter. The characters and the realm of The Wolf Among Us create a powerful draw, but i could not shake the sensation that i used to be somewhere i did not belong. The sector of Fables is so rich and so intriguing, is there really room for player agency? Within the Walking Dead, zombies are a variable that permit for flexible dramatic staging. In Fables, the fairy tale characters are constants on a dramatic stage it really is already set. Without an inherent narrative flexibility, The Wolf Among Us makes an ungainly fit for the winning Telltale formula.