Welcome to a new year of Indie Game of the Week! We'll be talking about another fifty Indie games in 2018, barring any apocalyptic mishaps, starting with Telltale Games's 2013-14 fairytale-themed detective noir serial graphic adventure The Wolf Among Us.

I'd originally planned to put this one off for a while despite the glowing reviews it received at the time, in part because I'm generally not all that enthusiastic about Telltale's "choices change the story" shtick but also in case I wanted to do some background reading of Bill Willingham's Fables comic series, on which this game is based. More recently, however, Telltale announced a sequel series for The Wolf Among Us coming in 2018 and I figured I'd better get ahead of it in case its release prompted everyone to start discussing the events of the first game and their choices and what have you. Better late than never, I suppose.

The Wolf Among Us, and Fables for that matter, imagines a world where the fairytale characters from folklore and nursery rhymes were suddenly forced to leave their land of magic and whimsy and try to make it in the "mundane world", occupying a part of New York City that has been magically enchanted to remain low-key and eke out a living alongside the "mundies". It reminds me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade's world, where there's a community of magical oddballs that are required to self-govern their wilder elements and adhere to a set of rules underscoring the importance of anonymity and secrecy in a world of humans. Adding to this comparison is the idea that the Fables, as these magical creatures and people are collectively known, are effectively ageless, highly durable, and have continued to grow and evolve over hundreds of years, stripping away the more barbaric and naive aspects from their source material incarnations to become closer approximations of deeply flawed humans with a whole lot of baggage related to their chequered pasts.

The Fable that most personifies this struggle is our protagonist Bigby Wolf, a.k.a. the erstwhile "Big Bad Wolf" of Little Red Riding Hood and Three Little Pigs fame. In addition to being the acting Sheriff and protector of the Fable community, Bigby's a ticking time bomb of animalistic rage, barely kept in check by a sardonic and cynical personality that belies a genuine desire to be a better entity, and the player is free to play him as either a raging beast eager to keep the peace by ensuring everyone knows who is boss, or a rehabilitated arbiter of the law who resists his atavistic, violent urges in order to do what's best for his fellow Fables.

I obviously don't want to get too deep into spoilers, given half the reason I'm playing it now is so I don't get spoiled myself - it's a murder mystery whodunnit, like most noir fiction, so spoilers are a little more pertinent here than they would be normally - but to summarize the plot in brief: someone is killing Fables, and in particular seem to have beef with the "Woodlands" Fables, those with enough money to afford a nice apartment building while the rest live in tenements and dives or "a farm upstate", where the more bestial Fables have been sequestered away to keep them out of view of the mundane humans. Bigby's surrounded by deadbeats and vicious drunks, though none he would consider capable of the cold-blooded malice behind the murders, and much of the game so far has been following trails and hunting for clues. The player has an active role in solving each crime scene's little mysteries, piecing together what the evidence suggests; I've no idea what effect it would have on the plot (if anything) if you mess these investigations up, though I suspect an NPC might step in and correct Bigby on his erroneous deductions. When you aren't looking at crime scenes or talking to NPCs, you're taking part in Telltale's requisite QTE-enabled action sequences, brawling with an unhelpful Fable or chasing down a fleeing suspect in cutscenes with timed prompts. The gameplay's more or less what I've come to expect from Telltale after playing Tales from the Borderlands and watching a few LPs of their The Walking Dead games, and it works well enough for them. We're really here for this story and this world, after all, and I think both are solid so far.

I keep saying "so far", so you might correctly infer that I'm not actually done with the game just yet. As of publishing this entry, I'm three episodes into its five-episode season. I thought about doing some episode-by-episode rundowns and talking about the decisions I made, similar to how I discussed Tales from the Borderlands and Life Is Strange, but I think I'd be better off doing it in one fell swoop once I've completed all five parts. I'd get a better sense of how my version of the story came together from the choices I made, and whether or not I felt like I had much control or influence over the way the game will eventually end and the relationships I'd formed. Therefore, my current plan is to finish the game between now and tomorrow's usual Saturday Summaries piece, in which I'll write up a conclusive examination of the game specifically for those who have already completed it and know the general story beats so I wouldn't have to summarize the whole plot, since doing that was always what made those previous reviews far too long-winded.

As for my currently-incomplete, spoiler-free appraisal for the game: I'm really into it, and the usual Telltale jank (some weird facial tics and a part where I reloaded because an item didn't seem to appear) isn't taking me out of the immersive story. I'm enjoying how the game incorporates famous fairytale figures into typical noir roles - Ichabod Crane as an anally-retentive bureaucrat afraid of his own shadow, Beowulf's Grendel as an irritable drifter barfly, or Beauty and the Beast as a married couple with trust and money issues - and the grisly murder mystery linking them all together, and I'm definitely eager to see where the final chapters lead. As always, it's an episodic game I'm thankful to play in one binge session like this, as I can't imagine being left in suspense after its frequent cliffhangers for months at a time was all that fun. I'll go into more detail later, once the game is complete and I can freely engage in spoiler-blocked observations, but I think this will prove to be a promising start to 2018's Indie Game of the Week feature.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)