Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Being a Werewolf Detective and Loving It!

My love of detective fiction is well documented: I've spent years of my life looking at the form, its tropes, its evolution, and its capacity to reflect on the society that it, through its investigations, seeks to instigate in various fashions.  I've written here, on occasion, about just how lamentable it is that video games don't appropriate more of the tropes of detective fiction or make more games that play on notions or structures prominently featured within the genre more often.  What exacerbates the paucity of detective-y games is just how bad "noir"-ish games are.  These are games that thematically associate themselves with the literary pallet that is often used to compose detective fiction, usually featuring qualities like a focus on moral gray areas or criminal enterprises as prominent plot points, but don't necessarily engage with concepts like "investigation," or make prominent use of the locative power politics that detective fiction traditionally relies upon in its construction of character and narrative.  These games, objects like Kane and Lynch, Call of Cthulhu, and Metro: Last Light, use elements of noir in constructing their worlds, but lack even the most basic nods to noir's granddaddy, the detective story, in the construction of their gameplay, and suffer doubly as a result.  Even games that utilize the noir pallet effectively, titles like the Bioshock series and Gunpoint, often do so in a manner which dissociates play from the themes of detective fiction (though Gunpoint gets major points for actualizing the locative acquisition trope that Raymond Chandler's Marlowe uses to navigate potentially hostile or foreign spaces in its hacking gameplay).  As such, noir games that let you play as, in some manner, a detective are rare.  Even games like Condemned, which are ostensibly about solving crimes, devolve into rough hewn combat sims that partition gameplay elements away from one another.  So a game like The Wolf Among Us is rare.

I know it's a bit silly to be writing this now, four episodes into The Wolf Among Us, after people have probably jumped on the Telltale train if they wanted to even a little in the wake of Wolf's incredibly positive reception, but I don't care.  I just discovered Wolf on sale and, as such, finally got a chance to play it, so I'm going to talk about it. 

I've been a long time fan of Willingham's Fable series, so it already took quite a bit of effort for me to hold off from buying Wolf at the meager $25 price it originally came out for, but now, one episode in, I can see that I should've bought it, played it, and written about it months ago.  So I won't go all "review-y" on Wolf - I don't think anyone needs that right now, the consensus is in, this is a fucking fantastic game, we all get it - but I do want to talk about what it does that no game before it ever really has: it fully realizes detective fiction/noir as a genre in an interactive narrative context.  It's the first real Chandler-esque video game.

Credit for this is due, in large part, to the fact the game's plot centers on investigating crimes (!) with damsels in distress and femme fatales (!!) and brutal combat that focus not on how empowered and tough you are, but on how vulnerable you can be (!!!) - these are all well travelled aspects of detective fiction.  You're also navigating foreign spaces, familiarizing yourself with their component parts and then utilizing that knowledge to uncover new information about crimes, all the while doing so without a real safe space of your own to return to (as evinced by both Colin the Pig's presence in your apartment and, spoiler alert, the placement of the various heads on your literal doorstep in Act 1).  Chandler would be proud of just how thoroughly Willingham's Bigby has been realized, not as myth made flesh, but as flesh made myth, a person who feels real, who is forced to inhabit the spaces contained within detective fiction, who is forced to make the decisions we normally passively witness Marlowe making.  We are not writing our own detective story here, we're inhabiting it, deciding who we want to be: Sam Spade, Lew Archer, or Easy Rawlins, these archetypes are all on display, ready to be mixed together, so that sympathy might be mixed with hard-nosed beatings and taciturn silence.

But all of this pales to the notion of investigation, and how it's realized within games.  As an adventure game The Wolf Among Us, by merit of genre, exists in a space where click-able objects are highlighted, a convention which usually removes all tension from the investigatory process.  But, unlike games where we're asked to follow the dotted line on the mini-map or languish in obscurity, or approach the brightly colored object lest we listen to our talking head characters prattle on endlessly, these objects, and the information garnered from them, becomes part of an investigation we're asked to piece together.  We're guided a bit, shown what Bigby chooses to focus on as he looks at clues, given information that we might not have otherwise based on what Bigby smells (a crucial aspect of the Fable comics wonderfully translated in the game), but we're never forced to utilize particular evidence, or even discover it.  You can abandon crime scenes or investigate thoroughly, draw conclusions of your own volition, conclusions that may very well be wrong.  You're forced to choose which suspect to pursue, which suspect to question and how.

The end result is a game that makes you feel less like you're following a series of leads, and more like you're actively participating in an investigation.  In The Wolf Among Us, I've had the distinct feeling that I could be doing something wrong (or that I simply am doing something wrong) more than once.  I've been moving through the city on hunches, using my best judgment to determine where to go next, picking suspects based on where I think they'll be eventually lead me.  I get the distinct impression that I'm actually engaged in something adjacent to detective work, or at least the sort of detective work narrative fiction has imposed on to our conceptualization of police and police investigation.  I feel like I'm writing my own detective story, which is exactly what Telltale seems to want: not to tell a story, but to allow you to inhabit one.

I cannot separate who I am and what my experiences, both with the Fable universe and with detective fiction as a genre, from my experiences playing The Wolf Among Us.  I cannot say that I'd be quite so affected by this game if I hadn't spent years of my life invested in its component parts, because that scenario is impossible for me to imagine.  What I can say is that I am an exacting critic when it comes to detective fiction, a real son of a bitch.  I hunt for flaws, even tiny flaws, in every element.  I call procedural bullshit on movies that disregard trade craft for cheap thrills and the service of plot.  I cuss out bad short story writers who pull together mysteries out of intended outcomes, rather than allowing their stories to emerge as whole cloth creations imbued with a sense of both their surroundings and characters.  I've little patience for those who wish to wear the trappings of noir without investing themselves in the traditions that the genre has been built upon (troubling power and racial politics and all).  And as a loud, opinionated dickhead who isn't afraid to call bullshit, I am especially unafraid where noir and detective fiction are concerned.  I do not simply feel like I can criticize detective fiction if I want to: I go out of my way to do so.  I look for the seams in these objects, I pick at them mercilessly.

So when I say I have no problems with The Wolf Among Us, I want you to understand just how high a praise that is.  This is the most detective fiction-y game that I've ever played, the most noir-y noir game that has ever darkened a doorway.  I mean that in all the best ways, and none of the bad ones.  Well, almost none of them, anyway.