The Wolf Among Us Walkthrough and Review(Description)Part 1-KJS
0As you make your way through the dialogue options The Wolf Among us, the game periodically give you little notes about how your choices affect the story and the other characters. A little alert might pop up to tell you something like:
You told the truth
You connected the evidence
Snow will remember that you took her side
Of course, a more honest alert might sound more like this:
Your decision has been carefully recorded for posterity and immediately flushed down the toilet
Nothing you decide in this game matters, which wouldn't be a huge deal except for the fact that decision making is the sole game mechanic. It's tough to give players real choices because it requires a lot more content for the same amount of play time. Other games have run into this issue and some have found innovative solutions.
The Stanley Parable leaned right into it, making the very concept of player agency part of the story. Gone Home, a game in which literally everything that happened happened before the the protagonist even entered the narrative, built uncertainty and used environmental storytelling keep the player engaged. Wolf unfortunately has no tricks up its sleeve to balance its series of pointless "choices."
Maybe the biggest problem isn't that the choices aren't meaningful, it's that the game won't let you forget how meaningless they are for even one second. Between chapters it asks the player to sit through a recap of the previous chapter and a preview of the next, both of which serve as reminders of how linear and immutable the plot is. It's as if the game wants to constantly remind you about all of the events that are going to happen no matter what you do.
It doesn't help that the plot sometimes feels like an arbitrary string of red herrings and unconvincing fake-outs. We may see a character shot in the chest in one scene, only to to be told in the next that they're fine because of magic or whatever. In a fictional universe where the rules of magic are never totally spelled out, these kinds of deus ex machina moments are inevitable and they don't need to ruin the story, but too many of them in a row can make the stakes just seem very, very low.
It's kind of a bummer because there are some great things about the game. The voice acting is perfect and the writing faithfully recreates the weird, gritty fairytale world of the comics. The art is also pretty much dead-on in matching the comics while adding some dynamic elements, although some of the character movements push it into the uncanny valley. You can also expect to spend a few minutes on google trying to figure out how to fix the game's totally hideous lack of anti-aliasing (luckily it is fixable).
I marked this review, "not recommended", but my thoughts on it are more mixed than that. I do intend to finish the game, I'm just disappointed.
Other Videos By KJS End-Credit Scene
Other Statistics
The Wolf Among Us Statistics For KJS End-Credit Scene
At present, KJS End-Credit Scene has 36 views spread across 5 videos for The Wolf Among Us, and close to 6 hours worth of content for The Wolf Among Us published on his channel. This is less than 0.76% of the total video content that KJS End-Credit Scene has uploaded to YouTube.