What The Wolf Among Us brings to the table is an injection of actual detective work. The pace is functional, simple, and satisfying. After the options are exhausted, the story advances.

Each scenario brings you to a new area, where you collect items, speak to others, make decisions on how Bigby reacts, and face the occasional quick-time sequence for some truly stellar, hard-hitting fights and chases. Very little's been shaken up from Telltale's well-understood template, and it really doesn't need to be. Bigby is ordered by Ichabod Crane, Fabletown's ersatz, twitchy deputy mayor, to investigate quickly and quietly. Taking place in 1986, nearly 20 years before the events of Fables, the game's story begins with the first genuine murder to occur in Fabletown in some time. It's sobering, sad, and tense, and occasionally, it even has time to be magical.

The Wolf Among Us, on the other hand, is less a story of what legends and folklore figures would do with the real world than a straight, neon-colored allegory, a Dennis Lehane nursery rhyme that uses the loss of a fairy tale homeland as a jumping off point to address issues of neighborhood class struggles and possibly the best exploration of immigration that isn't Papers, Please. Fables the comic is very much a product of its medium it's a series of one-off mysteries, random tales of fable life, and more traditional, comic book character studies, showcasing magic just behind the scenes of a real world. Where the game and its source material diverge is in aim and tone. The vast majority of them settle in Fabletown, conveniently located in Manhattan, and you follow the efforts of Fabletown's elite and its sheriff, Bigby Wolf, to keep this new home from falling apart. The premise is this: The land in which all the figures of fairy tales and folklore reside has been overrun (by a shadowy figure called The Adversary, oddly not mentioned in the game), forcing a mass exodus into the mundane-i.e., human-world.

That would be an insult if not for the fact that Telltale Games, by way of Bill Willingham's strong source material, is far too talented to waste the premise on violence and grim urban reality for its own sake. In 2014, in a pop culture environment where “make it grim and gritty because we’re ad ults!” is the default and least-inspired approach to everything innocent that's ever been made, The Wolf Among Us feels right at home.

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