This game really reminds me of why I hate fairytales and fables and why they don’t have a prominent place in my home. You play through this game as the sheriff of Fabletown Bigby Wolf who is in charge of keeping these rowdy assed fable characters out of trouble and making sure that they stay “glamoured” so that regular old humans like us (Mundys) don’t see them as they really are. Bigby strolls around laying down the law and sending folks to The Farm, but he’s not very popular for doing it. Apparently his years of eating small children and blowing down houses have made him none to popular with the other Fables, but his “bad ass” attitude does seem to make him perfect for the job.
Launch Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIgx0vPPDtA
As for the experience of the game itself, let’s start with the fact that in the first hour of this game we encounter three women (because they even made the omniscient mirror on the wall male), first an initially nameless prostitute who is getting the crap beaten out of her by an angry john for trying to get payment and basically not answering the “What’s my name, bitch?!” question properly, second the trophy wife, Beauty, who is apparently sneaking out on her husband for some mysterious reason and needs Bigby to keep her secret, and third the no nonsense Snow White who is a glorified lackey to Ichabod Crane (who is a degenerate who boasts of his daily visits to a female “massage therapist”) and who causes more trouble than she is apparently worth even though Bigby seems to be secretly in love with her. And if you think that these descriptions make them sound bad most of them only get worse as the hour goes on, but I don’t want to spoil the mystery that finally starts to unfold about 45 minutes in. What a stellar cast of feminist role models!
As far as the game mechanics themselves are concerned, they are reminiscent of the mechanics in The Walking Dead series where timing is key and certain scenes feel like TellTale is getting a cut for every RSI treatment between now and the end of this series. One of the most frustrating things, for me, so far has been the scenes where you have to rapidly and repeatedly hit a button only to have the action fail anyway. It’s as if they want you to think that you have some agency in that case, but you really didn’t (I’m going to replay the first hour again just to see if this theory holds true) because you kind of needed to fail in order to progress the narrative. Perhaps this is a response to the folks who called for more gaming mechanics after The Walking Dead (TWD)? I also noticed that the checkpoints in this game seem to be more frequent than in TWD. In the TWD, failure at some points felt like it took you too far back into a slow portion of the narrative or to the beginning of the action scene rather than back to the point right before you failed. To interact with people and things within the game you have to hover over a particular segment of them and then press the corresponding button on the pop up wheel that is triggered. It took me a moment to realize that the buttons that I was supposed to be pressing corresponded to the color of the buttons on the controller which was kind of counterintuitive because every other active in the game was represented by a giant letter popping up on the screen. The first time I died in the game it was because I was pushing x for action rather then the red button that I was supposed to on the color wheel of confusion! Again, with only one hour of gameplay under my belt and having only failed twice (just to test this theory, of course) this may not be the case as I play more of the game. I am hoping that I have just gotten out of practice since it’s been a while since I played The Walking Dead.
The sexism and misogyny that is present in children’s stories is only made more clear for me by playing this game. I would like to say that perhaps that was the intention of TellTale games with this series, but it feels too much like they want you to feel good about going all Lone Wolf and saving damsels in distress. That’s a trope that we have definitely had enough of! But this is only the first hour of the first of five episodes…maybe it will get better, right?
