The Wolf Among Us

2023-10-15
Weird to go back and play a Telltale game for the first time after the studio already imploded. I remember seeing these get churned out and thinking "Why would I play a visual novel with no real gameplay?" And the answer is obvious after you play The Wolf Among Us: because while it may be light on gameplay, it has a great story, great voice acting, superb visual styling with cel shading, overall unique style and vibe, great music--in short, it's a work of art.

One thing that's hard to weigh up when evaluating the game critically is how much of what makes it great is just the original source material of the graphic novel. Obviously the plot is entirely ripped from the source material, things like the visual style can probably be attributed to both the game devs and the source material, and things like the voice acting and music are entirely the domain of the game devs. Despite this ambiguity, I think the one thing you can say is they really did make a cohesive product. The music, visual style, plot, voice acting all comes together in a really fluid way. It's its own thing in the same way a Persona 5 or a Devil May Cry are.

On the gameplay front it's basically you making little decisions in conversations and sometimes they matter and most of the time they don't. It's blah for me but that's fine because you're really in for the ride. The problem is there are certain scenes like boss fights (especially the last one or two) that are just tedious as all hell. Basically repetitive quicktime events.

If you can get past the pretty shallow gameplay you're left with what is basically a really cool TV show with some basic interactivity. And clocking in at 9 hours it's a short TV show at that. It's not a game you must play but it's definitely a cool thing to check out.