Backlog Beatdown: Solving the Mystery with The Wolf Among Us

I downloaded the first episode of The Wolf Among us as part of the Games with Gold series last year. I didn’t play it until recently because I realised that I was going to want to play the other four parts as well, and as the free release of the first part was a clever ploy to snare me in to buying the rest of it, I thought it would be better to wait until I was able to do so.

I was very glad I did, because this game is GOOD. I would say that Traveller’s Tales games are good at telling the story, but that isn’t news to anybody. It hooks you in and keeps you engaged. The conceit of the setting – fairy-tale creatures living in 80’s New York trying to conceal their true identities – is not new but is very well done here. The characters are memorable and well-voice-acted, and the plot is strong. I won’t say too much about it here because you really need to experience it for yourself, but I paid roughly £15 for the whole package and enjoyed every moment.

Bigby in a heated discussion between Snow White
and Ichabod Crane. Yes, really.

But the game does have… an issue. Apart from the word ‘game,’ everything said in the previous paragraph could easily describe a TV series or a film. And playing this game is an experience not dissimilar to that. You play as Bigby Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf, in what is essentially a point-and-click adventure game. The controls are basic; almost all guided by button prompts. Exploring the scenes make no secret of the intractable items, and conversations are timed – you have a limited amount of time to respond to the different characters. Sections where Bigby is in danger are handled by quick-time events, which is fine for the context of the game, but present very little challenge because in most cases the only penalty for failing them is returning to the start of the sequence.

So the question is, are you OK with all of that?

And the answer is yes I am. I played some of the more popular adventure game franchises in the 90s – Monkey Island and Broken Sword – and while those games will always have nostalgic value for me and anyone who played them, I admit that they would not do well in the current generation of gaming. Most of the puzzles needed to be completed in order to move on, and if you didn’t know what to do the whole game would grind to a halt. The Wolf Among Us doesn’t allow the pacing to be interrupted in this way; it’s obvious what you have to do, and even if you don’t manage it, the game will move on anyway with slightly different dialogue and outcomes. For this generation, that kind of pacing is fine. But I remember beating the first Broken Sword game by almost making it a co-operative effort with my friend; we’d play through until one of us got stuck, then hand my copy of the game over to the other, telling what we’d learned and swapping over like that until we’d got to the end. That wouldn’t happen in The Wolf Among Us!

Tweedle Dee, and Tweedle Dum. And Bloody Mary,
who is an absolutely brilliant villain.

I would have liked to have to have seen some of the decisions you make have a more salient effect on the plot. Situations that can be handled differently depending on your responses, but the effect is how people handle you later in the game. The plot remains the same, no matter what you choose to do.

There are unlockables in the form of entries in The Book of Fables – a series of profiles of the characters, settings and history of the plot. As some of these are based on your decisions and what order you do things in, you can’t get all of these in one play-through; you have to back-track through the relevant sections to get them. I cheated by using a guide for this, but only after I’d completed the game anyway.

The Wolf Among us is a great piece of interactive storytelling and I’d more than recommend giving it a go. It’s not very challenging, but it flows well and is a good example of current-generation adventure games.