Who’ll protect you from the Big Bad Wolf? TellTale puts a big emphasis on choice in their games these days. The Wolf Among Us’s final episode “Cry Wolf,” and really the series as a whole, manages to become a new benchmark in the company’s increasingly impressive roster of games.
More so than any other TellTale game, many of the choices, both big and small, came back into play during the finale. The decisions my violent, play-by-his-own-rules Bigby made from all the way back to October’s first episode up through May’s fourth episode came back to bite me by the end of “Cry Wolf.”
The choices in episode five are some of the biggest and best of any series TellTale has put out. “Cry Wolf” begins right where episode four left off and keeps the pedal to the floor until the bitter end. Unlike some of the choices from past episodes, every decision brought up in the finale is made personal and carries weight and consequence.
Episode four ended with Bigby confronting the Crooked Man and his nefarious associates. From there, you are taken through the episode at a near-perfect pace, one that offers great closure and moments to characters both good and evil while also doling out some of the best action scenes TellTale has produced to date.
If you thought Bigby let the wolf out in past episodes, then you’re in for a spectacle in “Cry Wolf.” Between a high-paced chase through the streets and roofs of Fabletown and a tense and suspenseful throwdown with Bloody Mary, you’ll see that TellTale nails these action moments, which were arguably the weakest moments of prior games.
By the end of the game, you’ll feel the noir influences come back in full force, something I thought was lost a bit between episode one and now. The episode won’t answer all your questions, and Bigby won’t have all the answers by the end. The game smartly keeps some of these answers open-ended, leaving some of the detective work to the player.
The only problem this episode has is an absence of one of the central characters from the very first episode: Snow White. While everyone else gets their fair share of screen time during the finale, Snow’s appearances are oddly very minimal and just as forgettable. For someone who wanted to “do this together,” she is very absent in the finale.
Closing Comments:
The Wolf Among Us closes out in an incredible fashion. Everything clicked in place. Everything felt necessary. Everything felt earned and paid off. TellTale is a company that uses video games to tell stories, and The Wolf Among Us is their best to date.