Telltale’s latest adventure release is a prequel telling of Bill Willingham’s comic series Fables. It plays very similarly to their previous effort The Walking Dead and much of the make up that made that game so great can again be found again right here.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Fables series it’s a world where fairly tale creatures exist in an area of modern New York called Fabletown, here they keep themselves secluded from the outside world. You play as Sherriff to the town – Bigsby (aka The Big Bad Wolf). The game starts to a fight that has broken out between the Axeman (yes the one from Little Red Riding Hood) and an unknown girl. Mr Toad from Wind in the Willows is your first encounter, presented as a swearing cockney frog complaining about the cost of living in a grotty run down New York apartment. This pretty much sums up the entire tone for the game’s characters – gritty, dark and over exaggerated versions of their fairy tale beings. The writing here is really fantastic, the story as it progresses through it’s short period is already full of interesting hooks.
The game plays as an adventure that lets you choose how the story will pan out based on your actions throughout the game. These actions are achieved in one of two ways, the first is through Quick Time Events that will encourage the player to either mash a button or aim a reticule into a certain area and press the correct prompt. The second is through conversational choice. Again like The Walking Dead you have a limited time to answer these questions and each answer will make the other person respond to you in different ways.
Presentation wise Telltale seems to have nailed the Comic Book aesthetic and feel with this one. Each part of the world looks fantastic and the characters themselves look great. There’s some strong voice acting on offer here too with certain characters really being brought to life via their voice acting counter-part (see Mr Toad). There were a few hiccups in performance that I noticed while playing the Xbox 360 version; sometimes they even caused me to miss QTE events.
Overall this first chapter of the game will take about 3 hours to finish which was a little shorter than I’d have liked but already it’s clear to see this is going to be another winning formula.
