Just finished up the first episode, and I'm not sure how often new episodes are supposed to be released. The PS3 version isn't out yet (releases on the 15th) and while on the 360 episodes can be purchased one at a time for $5 each or in a Season Pass for $20, on the PC you can't buy each episode separately so you have to pay the full $25 up front. With that out of the way, my impressions:
At a gameplay level, The Wolf Among Us is Telltale's follow-up to last year's The Walking Dead game, but this time around they have chosen to adapt the Vertigo comic book Fables. For those unfamiliar with the comic, characters from various fables, legends, nursery rhymes, etc..., have fled their home due to an enemy simply called the Adversary, and have taken up living in the real world disguised as regular people. I've heard that the TV series Once Upon a Time has some similar concepts, but I've never watched it (honestly). Whereas The Walking Dead game used mostly characters who weren't in the comics, The Wolf Among Us takes place shortly before the start of the Fables comics and stars Bigby Wolf (the Big Bad Wolf, who disguised as a human is the Sheriff of Fabletown). The result of using established characters, and also due to not taking place in a zombie apocalypse, is that TWAU doesn't have the tension of knowing that just about every character introduced is going to die horribly at some point after you've grown to like them. That's not to say that there aren't some fatalities here, but despite what some scenes would have us believe, people familiar with the comics know that many of the characters here are presumably safe.
The presentation of the game is everything you'd expect from Telltale right now. The art direction is great, closely matching the comics, and the voice acting is top notch as well. Also, I'm not sure if this is a result of playing on the PC this time around instead of the PS3, but I haven't had any of the performance issues or stuttering I got when playing TWD. Everything here ran pretty smoothly. I haven't read anything about the 360 version, so I'm not sure if it has any sort of technical issues at all. The backstory might be a little hard for people who haven't read the comics to pick up at first. You can plop people down in the middle of a zombie apocalypse the audience will get it without much explanation. Here they've got some expository dialog with some of the characters, and there are some unlockable bios, but even with all that it might not be as accessible from a story standpoint as TWD.
Not much has changed with the gameplay itself. The action stuff has been marginally improved although I still find doing any sort of QTE stuff on a keyboard pretty clunky. After the first action sequence, I didn't screw up a single button press through the rest of the episode, and didn't make any mistakes in my second playthrough either so there's nothing too challenging so far. The one improved feature they seem to be touting is that:
The Wolf Among Us adds a new dimension to the way that choice matters. For the first time in a Telltale game, it not only matters WHAT you choose to do, but WHEN you choose to do it. Time is always ticking and even the Big Bad Wolf can’t be in two places at once. You’ll have to deal with the consequences choosing where to go and what to deal with at any given time.
My second playthrough was mostly to see what exactly changes in this episode depending on your choices, and there seems to be one instance where you have to choose the order you'll do something in, and it does make what would seem to be a big difference. Having seen both outcomes, it actually seems like one outcome is what people would consider the "good" one, which might annoy some people due to the fact that when you're making the decision there doesn't seem to be a clear right or wrong choice. Of course given how choice was handled in TWD, any difference each choice creates could be swiftly nullified in the next episode.
Overall, I'm really liking this so far although I likely wouldn't have gotten into as much if I hadn't read a lot of the comics. Clearly I'm the target market for Telltale's recent games. People who aren't into Fables or comics in general will probably find this to be another non-game.
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