Comic book games are becoming a dime a dozen as the comic book and superhero inspired fandom filters into pop culture. For fans of both comics and computer games we are very lucky then with the efforts of Telltale games.
Following the hugely popular success of The Walking Dead, Telltale has looked to another comic book franchise to be the centre of attention in their next game follow-up. The Wolf Among Us is based on Dc Comics and Vertigo’s Fable series created by writer Bill Willingham.
Fables is based around the premise that common fairytale characters were driven from their homeland and forced to live in our world in a small area of New York City. The hugely popular and successful comic book series has been running for over ten years.
The episodic format that Telltale created for the Walking Dead franchise has been brought into this new game with the Wolf Among us being split into five episodes, each comprising of six chapters. The developer has obviously learnt a lot: the game starts off very action orientated, with a large amount of quick time events. This is where you are given certain buttons to press to control the character and flow of the fight and it is something the developer also used in The Walking Dead.
The game starts off brilliantly as you play the part of Bigby Wolf. Formerly the big bad wolf within the fairytale world we know, Bigby is now the sheriff of Fabeltown, the fairytale community based in New York. At the start of his adventure he is called to investigate what we assume to be a domestic dispute and gets caught up in a fight almost instantaneously.
The storytelling and dialogue instantly grabs you and you are quickly drawn into the story of Faith and her situation with the woodsman. The action is also a great introduction to the game and helps to keep you engrossed before they start the main story, which is a mix of point and click adventure with some quick-time action adventures.
As the game progresses you get to meet a whole host of characters from fairytale fiction including Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Ichobod Crane, Colin (one of the three little pigs) and Mr. Toad to name just a few. It is a great nod for people who have read the book to see so many characters pop up in the game.
As we talk about how good it is to see characters familiar to readers of the franchise I must say that as someone who has read the comics for a long time, the voice acting was slightly off. I felt some voice acting was good, Colin the pig was great and Bigby himself was actually not far from what I had imagined. Mr. Toad and his son however were really off from what I would expect and this continues through to mainstay characters such as Snow and Beauty. While you quickly adjust to the voice acting there was some disappointment here and it was really hard to get used to the recurring character of Mr. Toad
The only other negative I could probably find with the game would be the loading times between chapters. There were some minor frame-rate issues that I experienced during my playthrough but the long wait in between moving to locations or watching cutscenes was reminiscent of the door loading scene from Resident Evil on the original Playstation. Honestly, the loading on this game was that bad!
Loading delays aside this is a great game for all. If you are a long-time fan of the franchise you may have a better understanding of the world and have an affinity for certain characters. People new to the world of Fables will however quickly fall in love with characters and the lore of the world through the clever dialogue and story tellers.
Some point and click adventures can sometimes be dull but this game does a great job of keeping a high pace with quick-time scenes interspersed with clever hide and seek items. Telltale have found a winning formula following The Walking Dead and I will certainly be following Bigby’s episodic adventures and would gladly pick up any other comic book based point and click games that this developer decides to release. I am already looking forward to the next instalment after the end of this one.
Bring on More Fables!!!!!
