The Wolf Among Us: Episode 3 - A Crooked Mile

After the ever-so-slightly lackluster Smoke and Mirrors, A Crooked Mile brings the series back up to its promising beginnings. The plot is increasingly dire and bleak, but it’s also one of the most sharply written games in recent memory.

The Wolf Among Us recovers the great level of its first entry and brings us a superb episode: interesting, with some nice interactions and some really great moments. A high point of the series.

The trick that Crooked Mile pulls off particularly well is in ditching “right” and “wrong” — this is ever more the land of shades of gray, and we found our choices dictated increasingly by the impact they’d have on the characters Bigby clearly cares for.

As new characters emerge near the end of this chapter, it appears that the storytelling is going to continue to grow even more bleak and grim. For a game drenched in neon colours and featuring new takes on childhood fables, this is an accomplishment in and of itself.

This third episode delivers a new pace to the series and puts the player under a pressure that really changes the experience. Fine dialogues, new characters, new clues and an enraged Bigby, this is what makes "A Crooked Mile" an indubitable milestone for The Wolf Among Us.

That aside, I think it's fair to say that A Crooked Mile is a more substantial chunk of content than Smoke & Mirrors was, and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Another lovely instalment to Telltale's noir thriller, though cracks in the studio's model and/or ambition are starting to show. [Issue#111, p.80]

A Crooked Mile continues the Fabletown tale in fine form, elevating it above the weaker second chapter and putting it on a par with the first.

Telltale make the most of what could have been a flabby third entry by piling on the pressure and ensuring you know that no-one is to be trusted. That said, the game's mechanics are clearly starting to show, which doesn't do the story any favours.

An improvement on the last episode and although some of the storytelling tricks are a bit of a cheat they’re all in the service of an increasingly intriguing plot.

I hope that Telltale is playing the long game here and that the final two episodes will pull everything together in a satisfying way. Not so much for the story - I find myself curiously unconcerned by the prospect of discovering the identity of the killer - but because I want to feel like I made a real difference during the time I spent in Wolf's clothing.