To my complete surprise, a game I’ve been interested in for ages suddenly appeared in the play store, for free. I howled with delight when I saw The Wolf Among Us available for zero dollars. I immediately thought “What’s the catch?” and after googling, discovered the catch to be that all the subsequent episodes are not free. Well, that’s a whole god-damned game for free! Now for the adverts…
It’s really weird playing an android game for an hour and not seeing a single advert. It feels abnormal, like recycling or talking to strangers. Can a game truly be an android game if it’s free and has no adverts, paywalls, or micro transactions? Perhaps it’s some kind of trick, an interactive wallpaper or hallucination. The developers at TellTale must be shitting their pants, it must be some mistake. Or, perhaps they published a game that wasn’t a total piss refinery and knew that people would be willing to pay for its equally good sequels. Nobody got hurt, nobody had to vomit out their eyeballs because they were asked to spend 79p on gems. They just made a game that was good.
Pay 79p to punch advertisers in the face. Bargain.
Gameplay is, well, it’s more of an interactive story with a few quick time events. I’ve ripped into android games for less and the controls are not the game’s selling point. Having played for about an hour, I can say that the story is interesting enough to warrant further sessions. The game is set in a section of New York where characters from mythology called “Fables” potter about trying to disguise themselves as humans using magic. There’s a gratuitous amount of swearing and violence which I suspect is to quickly dismiss any notion that this is a game for children (despite the character’s origins). It’s perhaps over eager in this regard but these help keep the narrative interesting and the dialogue is so well written that I’m genuinely interested to see what happens to many of the characters as they develop. I also think a bit of ultra violence is in short supply in the mobile games market. In fact, I’ve never seen a full decapitation or axe to the head in any games I’ve played. Such a pity. Come on Rovio, let’s see Angry Birds: Tarantino. There’s a market for it, I assure you.
Some negatives then. The game is buggy. I experienced a pretty severe crash that affected my Nexus 5’s OS and I’ve never seen any such issues from any other game. The autosave was well placed enough to prevent lost progress being an issue but I get nervous when I think about how badly my phone was chugging until I forcibly killed the power. On top of this, minor graphical issues are plentiful and the game caused my device to superheat to a temperature that defies the laws of thermodynamics so god knows what it would do to a lesser model.
I suspect the series will share some faults with the similarly engine’d The Walking Dead, with conveniently converging plot lines, completely illusory dialogue choices and too many unnecessary action scenes but these gripes don’t prevent it from being a largely enjoyable experience with engaging characters and meaningful stories that fans and newcomers to the series should enjoy.
Don’t not download this. It’s a paradise island among the sea of shit.
Games Whinge 