The fifth and final chapter of TellTale’s The Wolf Among Us is out now on the PlayStation 3 and hopefully those of you following along have played it now. There will be spoilers for the series below so if you have yet to finish the chapter you can check out our more general impressions of the first three episodes.
Cry Wolf picks up from where In Sheep’s Clothing left off and has Bigby face to face with The Crooked Man, the mastermind behind the murder’s Bigby has been investigating. You find out how these girls have been decapitated and those responsible for it, how Bigby handles these criminals is up to you. You also come up against Bloody Mary once again, only now she is in her creepier, glamourless appearance and is even more dangerous than before. This episode moves on at a fast pace in comparison to earlier on in the game, there are a lot of action sequences and when it looks like Bigby may be outnumbered, he at last breaks out his true form as the Big Bad Wolf to show how dangerous and powerful he truly is.
Everything starts to slow down once you capture the crooked man. You are given the choice of bringing him in for questioning or having Bigby kill him without a trial. If you bring him in Snow White and the other citizens will put him on trial and he will try to talk his way out of it, I chose the other option and instead brought his dead body back to them. From here the citizens have an argument about how Bigby seems to just do what he likes in the name of justice and that trusting him and Snow White to run the community is too dangerous. How you have played previously will come into play here as each citizen either defends or criticises you and how you have acted. I found this whole piece to be a bit drawn out having just come from a climatic action scene where Bigby had fought and killed Bloody Mary and The Crooked Man. In the end Bigby and Snow White are left in charge of the town and the tale is left open for more stories to follow.
The Wolf Among Us is set before the comic series Fabletown and having completed the game I would have to say I’d be interested in playing more tales of this prequel to Fabletown. After starting the game I began to read the comics the game was based on but stopped after the seventh compilation book as I enjoyed the game much more than the comic series. The style of the game and the character designs in it were more appealing to me than those in the comics.
The gameplay style remained the same throughout each chapter as with any of these type of game’s from TellTale. The controls always felt a bit strange in action sequences having to move the cursor over another point on the screen and then pressing another button, it is something you get used to playing each chapter but it always feels a bit awkward. The episodic format has been criticised by some with many fans wanting to wait unit all chapters are out before playing the game. I find it a good way to keep you interested in looking forward to the next part of the story and allows for suspense and cliffhanger moments the same way a television series would. However this will only work properly if the release dates can be more regular, during the release of each chapter there was sometimes no set date to expect the next chapter on or long delays. Sometimes certain platforms would get the chapter before others which only rightly annoyed fans further.
The Wolf Among Us is due to get a Vita release before the end of the year and a PlayStation 4 version is also expected. If you’re a fan of the comic series then you should definitely give this a try. If, like me, you’d never even heard of Fabletown before this game, then I’d still recommend you try The Wolf Among Us, it gives both well known and more obscure fairytales a modern and gritty twist.
