Game Review · Purchased August 5, 2026 · $9.99 CAD via Steam
The Setup
With a full remaster of the original Wolf Among Us confirmed for the end of October, and an actual sequel finally in the works after years of uncertainty following Telltale’s collapse, I decided it was finally time to play the original 2013 game before either of those arrive and change how I experience it. A deep Steam sale made the decision easy.
Living With It
Even more than a decade later, the noir-fairytale premise still holds up remarkably well: Bigby Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf himself, working as the sheriff of a secret community of exiled fairytale characters hiding in 1980s New York, is a genuinely great hook, and the game leans hard into hardboiled detective atmosphere rather than playing the fairytale angle for cheap laughs. The writing and voice work, especially Bigby’s world-weary delivery, carry a huge amount of the experience.
The choice-driven Telltale format shows its age more than the writing does. Frame rates stutter in a few of the more effects-heavy sequences, and the quick-time combat prompts feel exactly as clunky as I remembered from other games of this era. Knowing a remaster is imminent made some of these rough edges easier to forgive going in, since I was essentially treating this as one last look at the original before a cleaner version presumably fixes a lot of it. Even with the technical warts, the story pulled me through all five episodes in a way very few choice-based games have managed since.
What I Liked
- Exceptional noir-fairytale premise and writing that still holds up
- Bigby Wolf is one of the better protagonists Telltale ever wrote
- Genuinely gripping episodic structure that’s hard to put down
What I Didn’t
- Technical rough edges and dated quick-time combat prompts
- Frame rate stutters in some of the more effects-heavy scenes
The Verdict
Rating: 4.5/5
A genuinely great piece of writing wrapped around some dated tech. Worth playing now, and I’ll be curious to see what the remaster fixes.
