Edit: After some further reflection and discussion with friends, knocking down to a 3 instead of the former 3.5 and adding more detail to the review. Here's hoping Wolf 2 doesn't disappoint, if it really does still come out.
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A story which keeps you entertained and hooked well enough to keep going, with some cool exploration and haunting atmosphere, but nowhere near the capabilities of old Telltale at their best. What probably should have been three episodes (or even just a smoother non-episodic story) are stretched thin into five, resulting in each episode being either surprisingly short or padded, or somehow both at once. Honestly the vignette backstory of the third episode is going to stick with me more than anything from the main plot.
I will say, as someone with no prior knowledge of the franchise, the worldbuilding they were working off of did get me interested in checking out the books or show at some point down the line, so hey! It worked from a marketing tie-in perspective.
What about Telltale's signature choice-based gameplay? Some choices that seemed critical ended up having very little impact on the plot, while major story outcomes were just as likely to be decided by stuff you didn't realize was important at all, as if this game is an exploration of the butterfly effect. Some plot payoffs were based on finding random items in the exploration segments (which were often quite out of the way), so I ended up getting some negative results just because I didn't want to spend a large chunk of my limited free time scouring under debris in multiple episodes.
A decent enough comeback, though. The game looks lovely and ran well, and did captivate me enough, but it's hard to recommend unless you just REALLY love this style of game: unwinding at the end of the day with an interactive story that isn't too taxing on the wrists. And y'know what? I do. So I enjoyed it. (Shoutouts to my friends at the Telling the Tale podcast or I would not have discovered that!)
So yeah, I liked it! Mostly! But by comparison with a lot of other story-focused games I've played, its technical polish doesn't hide the fact that the story itself is rather low-tier. The central romance does a lot of heavy lifting, but its ultimate fate is one of the things that falls victim to the "hidden" nature of many of this game's choices, being decided by some things you couldn't have possibly foreseen were related. You can see that as a statement on futility and fate being out of our hands, or just annoying. I guess that choice is still up to you.
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A story which keeps you entertained and hooked well enough to keep going, with some cool exploration and haunting atmosphere, but nowhere near the capabilities of old Telltale at their best. What probably should have been three episodes (or even just a smoother non-episodic story) are stretched thin into five, resulting in each episode being either surprisingly short or padded, or somehow both at once. Honestly the vignette backstory of the third episode is going to stick with me more than anything from the main plot.
I will say, as someone with no prior knowledge of the franchise, the worldbuilding they were working off of did get me interested in checking out the books or show at some point down the line, so hey! It worked from a marketing tie-in perspective.
What about Telltale's signature choice-based gameplay? Some choices that seemed critical ended up having very little impact on the plot, while major story outcomes were just as likely to be decided by stuff you didn't realize was important at all, as if this game is an exploration of the butterfly effect. Some plot payoffs were based on finding random items in the exploration segments (which were often quite out of the way), so I ended up getting some negative results just because I didn't want to spend a large chunk of my limited free time scouring under debris in multiple episodes.
A decent enough comeback, though. The game looks lovely and ran well, and did captivate me enough, but it's hard to recommend unless you just REALLY love this style of game: unwinding at the end of the day with an interactive story that isn't too taxing on the wrists. And y'know what? I do. So I enjoyed it. (Shoutouts to my friends at the Telling the Tale podcast or I would not have discovered that!)
So yeah, I liked it! Mostly! But by comparison with a lot of other story-focused games I've played, its technical polish doesn't hide the fact that the story itself is rather low-tier. The central romance does a lot of heavy lifting, but its ultimate fate is one of the things that falls victim to the "hidden" nature of many of this game's choices, being decided by some things you couldn't have possibly foreseen were related. You can see that as a statement on futility and fate being out of our hands, or just annoying. I guess that choice is still up to you.