The Wolf Among Us : Faith – Feels more like fate than free will

Let me just start by saying that I’m really interested in seeing where Telltale Games goes with future episodes of The Wolf Among Us. For those that aren’t aware, the game is based on characters from the DC Comics series Fables. However, you don’t need to be familiar with the series at all since the game is set some 20 years before the first issue of the comics. It merges that whole quick moral dilemma decision making that people seemed to enjoy from the Walking Dead games with a gritty noir detective story about a serial killer stalking displaced fairy tale characters living in New York. While I’m loving the story in the game, I’m not really sold on this whole decision based storytelling. It sounds like a great idea, but I’m not sure that the execution really makes me feel the sense of agency that I was expecting.

The story in The Wolf Among Us is pretty compelling. You play Sheriff Bigby Wolf, the new identity of the big bad wolf from Little Red Riding Hood and Three Little Pigs fame among others. No surprise that you’re not exactly the town favorite among the fables. So as moral choices go, it’s pretty easy to slip into bullying and intimidation to get your way in the game. Maybe that’s just me. You can also try to roll with being the stern and silent type or actually attempt to be nice to the people you meet. It’s entirely up to you as long as you can make those decisions quickly. At least, it’s up to you which choices to make.

Here’s where my issue with the whole player decision driven plot idea comes in. Without giving too much away, it feels to me that most of the plot points are going to be static in the game regardless of what choices you make. I don’t have a problem with that as a general principle. If a plot needs to be driven in a certain direction to advance a story, that’s fine. What I don’t like is being told that my choices are meaningful when, in the end, they make virtually no difference. When I’m given a Scientology personality test for each conversation and keep receiving feedback about how a character takes note of my response or agrees with me or will remember that, I expect that they’re going to live more than another 5 minutes. Having to make a dozen decisions about how to interact with a story character only to find that my responses are completely irrelevant in a matter of minutes due to a pesky case of death tends to make me a little cranky.

Again, I think the story itself is fabulous even though I was already screaming at my character that the murderer is standing right there every time he appears on screen. At least I have my suspicions about the whodunit part of the plot. And isn’t that really what a good detective story should do for a reader (or in this case a player)? I’m ready to comb the seedy underbelly of Fabletown to suss out the bad guy. I can’t wait to get to a point where Bigby has to go completely feral and take out some other murderous fable. Maybe they get discovered by the mundies (fable racial slur referring to non-fables) and need to do terrible things to keep their secret safe. Frankly, the customized teaser for episode 2 that you get at the end is a phenomenal idea and I can’t wait to find out what’s going on between Beauty and Beast.

I know it’s only episode one out of five and I may be jumping the gun on this whole decision making rant. The Wolf Among Us is set to continue adding more content through summer of 2014 and I’m already salivating for the next installment. I will admit that I have two separate save files in which I have either saved or not saved one particular character from death. So I’m looking forward to finding out if that has any significant impact on the story in the coming episodes. Check back later to find out how that all plays out for me.