--Bigby Wolf, The Wolf Among Us
"Bigby Wolf. The Big Bad Wolf. You used to be something. They used to fear you. They'd hide anywhere their small shivering bodies would fit."
--Bloody Mary, The Wolf Among Us
The Wolf Among Us serves as a prequel to the DC Comics/Vertigo stories set in a universe where characters and creatures from various fables inhabit a city as they hide from humans, a tale of conspiracy and corruption that cleverly builds on well-known fairy tales as it explores everything from the abuse of sex workers to the way that a crowd of non-rationalists can be so very manipulated back and forth. This Woodsman, "big bad" Wolf, Snow White, and Bloody Mary are not the versions found in modern children's stories, and this frees The Wolf Among Us to invert cliches and let fairy tales serve as an ironic mirror that displays the potential complexities of the human heart, even if its characters tend to not be humans at all.
Production Values
The aesthetic style is a great fit for this kind of unconventional video game experience and for a more overtly cinematic tale, but long loading times and visual hiccups, which sometimes become extreme, mar the quality of the production values. The freezes and jolts of these hiccups can be so bad that they interfere with the quick-time events, with the screen freezing and then flashing to where players have less than a moment or two to press the right button before missing the prompt--and perhaps dying if they cannot press it with minimal warning, depending on the part of the game. Thankfully, the audio fares far better. Masterful line delivery when it comes to the voice acting rarely, if ever, suffers from the difficulties of the visual performance, and, in a cinematic game about choice and layered characterization, quality voice acting and writing are utter necessities.
Gameplay
A heavily dialogue-based game, The Wolf Among Us is largely played by deciding how to verbally respond to other characters, with combat quick-time events and mild investigative exploration comprising the majority of rest of the gameplay. Bigby Wolf can be kind, aggressive, or pragmatically cooperative depending on what the player wishes as he interacts with the residents of Fabletown, strengthening relationships with or disregarding others as is chosen. Since the outcome of various scenes is the same no matter what dialogue or behavioral option the player selects, the choices can be more limiting than they might seem at first, yet entire scenes can be added/removed or altered in some cases. None of this changes the context of excellent writing and worldbuilding that even the smaller dialogue options are presented in. Replaying most chapters to pick different choices is even necessary to obtain all of the PlayStation trophies for the game, though.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Years and years after gaining a reputation as the fierce creature known as The Big Bad Wolf, Sheriff Bigby Wolf, who can take a human form, ensures the legendary creatures of Fabletown do not mistreat each other or get seen by humans without glamours, magic spells that make them appear as humans despite really being an anthropomorphic animal. A prostitute's decapitated head is found on the doorstep of his living area, sparking a series of murders that drives Bigby to discover an entangled web of secrecy, deception, and figurative enslavement that has Fabletown in the grip of a shadowy figure. The investigation also gives Bigby repeated opportunities to decide if he wants to descend into the savagery associated with his earlier days or pursue justice itself.
Intellectual Content
Fabletown is a hotbed of fallacious beliefs and general stupidity, with some of the assumptions and errors of fellow Fables even interfering with Bigby's murder investigation. For instance, when Beast sees his wife Beauty and Bigby Wolf at the prostitute's hotel, he is enraged after he assumes that Beauty and Bigby are committing adultery together, when not only is this an assumption he does not even pause to recognize, but he himself is in the hotel, which by his own idiotic assumptions would mean he is inconsistent for exempting himself from suspicion! His physical assault of Bigby only slows down an investigation that he never had a reason to interfere with anyway. Beast, however, is one of the least calculating of these philosophically delusional beings. Fabletown is slowly revealed to be consumed with egoism, the inherently fallacious stance that one's preferences and self-interest are the ultimate good or the unsound pursuit of one's own wishes at the expense of all else. Ichabod Crane confesses just how easy it is to build a life around one's own preferences as the rest of one's existence crumbles, even if he had something else in mind when he said it: "It started as most things do: very, very small. Nothing more than a thought." Crane is actually a murder suspect for a time, with one of the things that other characters end up looking down on him for not actually being exploitative in itself, but his words are still very relevant to how assumptions enslave people, can drive them to destroy their lives, and provide nothing valid to cling to when the rug is pulled out from under them.
Also of note is how directly The Wolf Among Us handles the dismissal and abuse of sex workers--and it even shows an environment with male and female sex workers in a bold move that defies sexist stereotypes. While it does not actually portray or tackle sexual abuse in particular, the game repeatedly brushes up against subjects like this. There is not even any contradiction between the idea that at least some forms of sex work are immoral and that all sex workers do not deserve to be exploited or regarded as mere objects to be used and discarded as is subjectively convenient. A former prostitute's words at the end of the game reinforce just how helpless and trapped she and others like her were until Bigby took the murders of her companions so seriously. Ironically, even the true Christian stance on all of this is not what many would expect: the Bible condemns prostitution (places like Leviticus 19:29 and Deuteronomy 23:17-18 do condemn prostitution directly in various ways, though the separate condemnations of adultery and promiscuity would already exclude this), yet since nudity and sexual attraction are Biblically nonsinful (see Deuteronomy 4:2, though I have written extensively about other aspects of why these things are nonsinful), sexual stripping for money or sexual dancing would not be sinful in themselves. Even if they were, though, it would still not be the case that sex workers do not have whatever human rights everyone else possesses by virtue of being human.
Conclusion
It might not have the cultural visibility of Telltale's The Walking Dead games, but The Wolf Among Us is a superb addition to this very precise subgenre of gaming. Combining a much more mature take on fairy tales, the typical narrative complexity and deep characterization of Telltale games, and the special capacity of video games to better reflect the choices of human existence than any other artistic medium, this game succeeds on almost every level--and perhaps the flaws of the Vita version are absent from the version on home consoles. If it was not for the numerous issues with freezes and slowdowns in some of the interactive cutscenes with quick-time events, The Wolf Among Us would have even been perfectly situated on the Vita. Alas, only the mechanics, lore, and plot themselves are utilized well here, not the performance of the game.
Content:
1. Violence: From mildly graphic depictions of mutilated corpses to blood-inducing physical fights, there is violent imagery in this game that is certainly more at home with an M rating.
2. Profanity: Words like "shit," "fuck," and "bitch" are used many times throughout the five episodes.
3. Nudity: Female breasts are seen occasionally, though this is at most partial nudity in the same way the exposure of the male torso is.
4. Sexuality: Multiple parts of the game involve direct talk about sexuality. In one section, sexual noises can be heard from behind a door.
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