Telltale recently released the fifth and final episode for The Wolf Among Us. This weekend, as part of a continued experiment, I sat down with my wife and watched as she played through it. We’ve done so with previous installments (you can read the results here, here, and here), and I was looking forward to seeing how both the game and our shared experience would end.
Spoiler Warning: I’ll be discussing the plot and other game details in this post
The fourth episode came out during a busy time in our household, landing between various work trips, family visits, and other activities. For the first time, we rolled from one episode directly into the next. My big question was simple: Had she been wondering about what Bigby and the rest of the fables were up to? As it turns out, the answer was a big, fat nope.
“I gave it no thought, to be honest,” she says. Ultimately, it seems like Telltale’s episodic format, which is one of the things that sets its games apart, made it tough for her to remain invested in The Wolf Among Us. Take her interaction with Colin the pig, for example. “Things are spread out, and he didn't make a big impact on me from earlier on in the game,” she says. “All of a sudden you're making decisions on whether to send him to the farm, and you're like, 'I don't really care about this guy, I barely remember him.'”
The simple gameplay didn’t help to engage her, either. She skillfully guided Bigby through each quick-time event, leaving a bloody wake of chaos behind her. The veneer of choice and success didn’t fool her, however. Take an early moment in season four, for example. A doctor removes bullets from Bigby following a battle with Bloody Mary. All the while, he squirms from the pain of a compound arm fracture. She chose to fix it, whereupon she faced yet another QTE. This time she messed up, but the doctor immediately took over, repairing the limb.
“It's a little weird when you're supposed to do something and you don't do it, and it does it anyway,” she says. “What's the point of moving anything? Obviously, there are things you had to do in order to survive, but they weren't terribly difficult. Certainly, the point of the game wasn't to have you struggle through those.”