The Wolf Among Us: Episode 2 – Smoke and Mirrors Review (PS3)

Let me just start off with stating that I was never a big fan of Adventure games of old, but there’s just something about Telltale’s games that make me keep coming back. I enjoyed the Walking Dead video game which managed to win many Game of the Year awards back in 2012. Telltale are now back to doing what they do best with their latest offering – The Wolf Among Us.

We loved the first episode of The Wolf Among Us titled Faith, and now months later we finally make our way back to Fabletown and continue off from the Cliffhanger ending of the first episode. The game starts off with the aforementioned ending being concluded and our main character Bigby continuing his investigation. With the get go you’ll notice that Smoke and Mirrors is darker than the first episode as you travel to the more sinister areas of Fableltown.

Unlike the first episode, in Smoke and Mirrors you end up acting like Sherlock throughout the episode. Almost every scene has an interrogation section with Telltale even adding a Torture scene, which I’ll let you make an opinion on after you’ve played it out. You may like me end up playing the episode multiple times to find out what happens in every scenario, like it or hate it, it’s there.

Something that wasn’t familiar to me coming straight from a fresh playthrough of The Walking Dead was the lack our decisions affecting the  development of Bigsby as a character. Lee, the lead of The Walking Dead was a blank slate, allowing us to mold his personality scene by scene as our own. This is not a design choice, well I don’t believe it is anyway because the game is a prequel to the excellent Fable comic books. Bigsby’s character and what happens to certain people around him is already sort of known by readers of the comics. The choices to make the story go a certain way are still there but I don’t they will influence what happens in the next episode too much. After all the only important plot point that carried over into Smoke and Mirrors was who you choose at the end of Faith.

The Wolf Among Us is more of a traditional Adventure game compared to Telltale’s previous offerings. Items not directly related to the narrative which you can miss and casual puzzle solving is introduced which I liked a lot, the gameplay overall is much more enjoyable. There were instances of performance problems like the occasional frame rate drop and stuttering, hopefully this can be fixed in a patch in the future but it’s not something major.