'Cause I Gotta Have Faith-a-Faith-a-Faith... The Wolf Among Us Episode 1 - Faith Review

Written By: Tyler Selig

Rating: 8.5/10

Verdict: Episode 1- Faith treats us to a compelling story and an incredible first episode, where the choices you make matter.

"Where is it? Where is my Lorde CD?"

I am going to start this off by throwing out a blasphemy. I have never played The Walking Dead. My reasons are ignorant, but I never played it, so I had no idea what I was getting into in The Wolf Among Us. I heard great things about the developers and The Walking Dead, but I avoided videos and articles about the game. I went in mostly blind.

                I also never read Fables. It has always been one of those comic book series that I put on my “To Read” list, but haven’t gotten around to actually checking that one off.

                You play as Bigby, who is the Big Bad Wolf, only now he is a Sheriff. He has put all the bad things he did in the past behind him and is now trying to help people out. The game starts with you meeting Faith, a prostitute who eventually meets an untimely death. So of course, Bigby wants to know what happened to here, and the rest of Episode 1 consists of you putting on your detective hat to solve the case. From that point on, you meet a compelling cast of characters from fables of all sorts, and each interaction is intriguing.

                The main draw of The Wolf Among Us is the decision making, and it succeeded in making me feel like every question I was asked was important. Whether it’s being aggressive, or saying nothing, I thought hard – in the small amount of time it gave me, which is important because it forces you to make hard choices on the fly – about every decision I made. I was always at the edge of my seat in anticipation of how what I decided would impact the world around me and my relationships with other characters.

                An adventure game with a focus on decision making could end badly if you don’t feel that how you react is important in some way. If you can’t guess it from what I said above, Faith gets it right in a big bad way. Ultimately there is a story arc that the game will follow, but how you go about your business will change things to some degree.

                Since the first episode falls within the hardboiled detective genre, it only feels right that the game is sufficiently dark. From the way characters talk to one another, to the moody comic book visuals, and to the music which admittedly ended up subtly drawing me into the situation rather than bringing attention to itself, TellTale has done everything they could to make you believe in the world you’re inhabiting for this short period of time (though there are more episodes on the way).

                Like Beyond: Two Souls (review coming in the near future), the game is pretty heavy on making you watch, outside of some periods where you can walk around in a limited area. However, the story never fails to be interesting and the questions you get asked making you keep your hands on the controller or keyboard and mouse, because you only have a set period of time to answer most of them. So you’re always involved.
               There are slight technical problems, frame-rate hiccups during transitions for example, but they really aren’t a big deal and I can’t understand anybody making a big deal out of them. Still, as a reviewer, I feel it is my duty to at least point it out.
               Sometimes they throw in fight scenes and these are a blast, despite the fact that you don’t actually move Bigby. Fight scenes consist mostly of QTEs… move left, move right, press up, down, press a button repeatedly. I’m not big into the whole QTE movement, but Episode 1 makes fights action packed by allowing you to move your cursor to objects that are highlighted. What this means is that you could be fighting someone and you have a choice to hit them with a glass, shove them into a wall, etc. This little touch does make you feel more engrossed in the actions on screen.

                Faith is a wonderful first episode, and it ends with such a heart-wrenching scene that I can’t wait to play the next one. Fans of this genre take heed, because this is something to keep an eye on.