Of course Bigby survives, thanks in no small part to the help of a kindly doctor, but it wouldn't be the last wound I'd suffer over the course of the episode. Yet I still ended up with a gunshot wound for my trouble. I tried to play the sequence as coolly as I could, allowing Lily's sister Holly and her friends to intimidate the pair. Regardless as to how I chose to proceed, the thuggish pair of Dee and Dum would inevitably arrive to cause a commotion, apparently on the hunt for the same man that I was. This is the first of the "big" choices the game offers you, though it also seemed like the least consequential. No matter how mad Bigby might have been, I wouldn't have felt right barging into the funeral service, so I chose instead to let Snow continue her speech and inspect the tributes people had brought to honor their fallen friend. Thankfully, as you show up at Lily's funeral looking for Snow, the game continues to offer you nicely varied choices for how to proceed. At the beginning of "A Crooked Mile," as Bigby storms off to find Snow so he can tell her what's been going on, I was initially worried that room for that kind of nuance might be lost in favor of an anger-fueled revenge bender. I've been playing Bigby as a character always on the verge of unchecked rage, allowing him to express his frustration with the constant stonewalling by the other Fables he encounters, while only resorting to actual violence in the most dire circumstances. Still, with Crane being the only available suspect, it's no wonder that "A Crooked Mile" becomes all about finding him before he skips town. Crane's twisted way of sating his unrequited desire for Snow certainly deserves some justice (as does the reveal that he's been embezzling money from Fabletown for years), but nothing about the guy strikes as a cold-blooded killer. But even with that reveal at the end of the last episode, it becomes clear early on that Crane as the murderer of Fabletown's working girls still doesn't make a ton of sense. While it makes sense from a storytelling perspective, that intense focus on investigation puts the onus on the game's investigative mechanics to pick up the slack left by the lack of surprises in the episode's plot, and that's just not something this series' gameplay is well-suited for.Īfter episode two left him standing in a blood-soaked hotel room, glaring angrily at a photo of Crane molesting a prostitute "glamoured" to look like Snow, it's no surprise that Bigby becomes hellbent on finding his former employer. That's especially true of "A Crooked Mile," and episode that laser-focuses on Bigby's hunt for the vile presumed murderer, Ichabod Crane. Lacking that sense of relief one gets from finishing an episode of The Walking Dead, every episode feel like it blows past, like you're just getting to something good before the rug is pulled out and you've got another month-long (or longer) wait until the next story piece. But its third episode, "A Crooked Mile," finds this first season suffering a bit from its own structure and game design. Visually, it manages to bring together the neon-tinted grime of 1980s New York with the fantastical world of Fables in a stunning way, and the story has plotted out some nifty twists that I never saw coming. Overall, I've been enjoying The Wolf Among Us so far. Unfortunately, it's not The Wolf Among Us. Yet the two series offer similar gameplay designs and an identical release structure, and only one of them directly benefits from either of the above. After all, this is a noir-flavored detective procedural, and not an apocalyptic survival tale. But it's nowhere near as pervasive as in The Walking Dead. The Wolf Among Us is a game that certainly deals in moments of dread and unexpected death, and comes with a generalized feeling of depression that permeates every personality you come into contact with. Maybe you're still itching to see what's going to happen in the next chapter of the story, as I often am, but more times than not, I'm also grateful that I get a break after two hours or so of constant character deaths, tough decisions, and abject misery pouring in from every corner of the game's world. As a series that deals regular moments of sheer soul-draining sadness, there is a feeling of emotional reprieve that comes with the end of each episode. The episodic structure of Telltale's The Walking Dead franchise is arguably one of the best things about it. Those who have not played the episode but intend to probably shouldn't read this. Editor's Note: As a reminder, this is a spoiler-heavy discussion of the latest episode of The Wolf Among Us.
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