I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The Wolf Among Us

I have had The Wolf Among Us sitting on my hard drive for ages. I had actually gotten pretty far into the first episode when I first got the game, but for some reason I had never gone back to the game after that first time. I read a lot of articles about it, and I saw that a lot of people were into it, but I still never booted it up.

I feel like I made a mistake in not going back to the game sooner, because let me tell you, I have been wasting my goddamn time by not doing so. While the gameplay of WAU can be distilled down to “walk around, do some QTEs” it is delivered in a suitably cinematic way so as to mask the shallowness of the actual moment-to-moment gameplay. What makes that game (and The Walking Dead, from what I have heard; that’s a game I won’t play because ugh, zombies again and also I don’t have any love for the comic or the TV series) work is the story that the minds of Telltale have spun that so far feels very much like Mother Goose’s Chinatown.

I can get behind a concept like Mother Goose’s Chinatown. Bigby T. Wolf is a gruff, unlikeable fellow who smokes and drinks too much and has a past fraught with huffing and puffing whatnot. The game goes out of its way to remind you who he is by almost immediately confronting him with one of the three little pigs, which is such a great scene that I was pretty well sold on the entire game at that point. There’s a bit of a hopeless love interest in Snow White, a flying monkey from Oz, and, by the end of Episode 2, a picture of Ichabod Crane fingerblasting a glamoured troll.

Let’s all just pause and enjoy the imagery of that last bit. I know that I damn near fell out of my chair.

Perhaps my most enjoyable moment of The Wolf Among Us (and there have been many enjoyable moments in this game!) was the final choice offered at the end of Episode Three, not the least because I literally had been talking to my brother about how I was going to rip out Tweedle Dum’s fucking throat AND THEN I COULD. It was glorious. The story has engaged me and the soundtrack is perfection.

The gameplay, though, is mostly shit. Investigating stuff, looking at bits and bobs, and listening to Bigby talk either to himself or to whoever else is in the room is fine. The timed conversations are great. The QTEs fucking blow, and although I’ve never botched one enough to actually be confronted with a Fail State (does this game even have a fail state) there have been enough moments where I’ve been like “oh, I have to move my suddenly sluggish mouse over there” and then not been able to for me to become just frustrated enough to dislike them more than I normally would.

It’s not enough to stop me from playing this game, though. I’m in too deep, owe too much to too many bad people. Storm’s coming, and Bigby and I aren’t gonna be caught out in the rain.

Side Note: Hey, if you have any interest in what I do and you want more of it, my aforementioned brother and I have a podcast that we just started. You wanna give it a listen, maybe subscribe to it, you go ahead.