I knew nothing of Fables before The Wolf Among Us fell into my lap, and seeing the game on Steam without knowing anything about it I thought “This looks like some lame low budget monster movie game.”
How wrong I was to find myself falling into a Telltale adventure game with rich characters, strong actions, a great combat mechanic and choices that inevitably make you feel like a dick.
Dude, get off my chair.
Unfortunately we won’t be reviewing it yet, as we believe episodic games should be reviewed as total packages. This is for a number of reasons, perhaps chief of which being that stories can deteriorate over time and we would feel bad recommending, say, Episode 1 if Episode 2 sucked (who would only want to play 1 episode of a series?).
That said, I will gush about it.
Having missed The Walking Dead games, this is my first foray into the idea of having to make important decisions on the fly and having to live with consequences, but now that I’m comfortable with it I think I like it. As the big bad wolf you’re the sheriff of Fabletown located around the Bronx under Ichabod Crane. Bad stuff is happening and you’ll have to half-investigate and half-pummel information out of people and the environment.
The characters are voiced very well, the writing is good, and every character is thus far interesting. Most of the fairytale characters are involved in heavy or unfortunate stuff be it poverty, drugs, prostitution, you name it. Oh, and murder.
The art style is just fantastic. I can’t stress enough that to me, cell shading always looks… half-baked. It always looks like someone wants their game to look hand-drawn but the effect just fails. Here though it works brilliantly. I have a very hard time taking any still shot of the gameplay that doesn’t look like a hand inked frame out of a comic book.
This is all in-game, folks. It looks great.
We’ll reserve all the details for when the game’s episodes are all out, but so far so good. Or I guess so far so fan-fucking-tastic, and that’s even taking into consideration that horrible depressing things have happened.
Do yourself a solid and start playing this if you’re remotely interested in adventure games.
