This is obviously hardly a game, the least of all the Telltale titles I tried, by far. There are many sections of the game, where a cutscene ends and you are dropped in the world, there you literally have 1 option to click something and 0 interactions with anything else and invisible walls from all sides. I truly do no understand why they even did that. Pad the time it takes the complete? Make sure the player is not asleep?
The only real gameplay there is (I will never acknowledge QTA as gameplay, it is just a gimmick, and a back one) are the choices. Those are indeed the best part of the game since most of them are actually meaningful and affect the playthrough of at least the episode in a big way. Not all choices are like that, there are many that are useless or "fake choices" that change barely anything, but it is nice, that even those small changes are taken into account.
And that is it in terms of gameplay.
In terms of the story, which is 99% of the game, there are some parts that are quite good, some that are mediocre, and quite a lot of bad ones. Since I prefer to end on a high note I'll just go with what is bad.
Everyone is miserable. I understand that the world presented is bleak and hard, but everyone is one tone, picking their attitude from an array of: angry, sad, evil, miserable. The only exceptions are Mr. Toad and TJ and the main character who is a mix of those if you decide so. The rest is just annoyingly one tone and unresponsive to your treatment of them. Snow White is especially guilty of it, having a horrible attitude towards Bigby even when you try your hardest to do things her way and be nice to her. She is supposed to be one of the good guys of the story, but fails to recognize any form of good will.
In general female characters are especially badly written or/and cliche to a pain. I know this is a noir story, but most women are prostitutes, the rest are: serial killer, owner of a low-life bar and Beauty, who is super ashamed of working the counter of a sex-motel and is the worst of them all. Her and Best are the only glimpse of the writers being aware that they are pushing the noir too hard, since they are completely guilty of their own problems, not being able to cope with having less luxury than they used to. I wish at least of those characters have been fleshed out, and Beauty was the closes to that, but ends up being a tertiary character. All the prostitutes have the same motivations for their line of work which they hate - I had no other choice. In reality they do have other choice. The Farm is mentioned many times, and even though some characters seem to be afraid of it, it is never really specified why would it be so bad. Apparently Fables there are taken care in material terms and don't have to hide? If I have to choose between slave-sex labor and a farm where I don't have to constantly dress-up as someone else I am choosing the farm.
Dumbledees story also seems like a waste, where no matter your attitude towards them, the end result is the same. It at least makes sense for them to be this stubborn , although it is rather unsatisfying that they simply do not learn anything from kindness or mercy.
And then the rest is just angry or sad people, where no matter what you do, beat them up, scream at them, or try to play it cool, they are gonna belittle you, complain, whine and moan about how bad you are and how shite their lifes are. It does get tiring.
The thing I am in the middle of is the main mystery. It is not particularly interesting "who-did-it" that plays it by the books of noir movies, with an ending that has no chances of being truly happy, although it does leave you with an option to truly punish everyone responsible, which is a bit rare in those kind of stories, where the game tries to question the morality of people responsible and make it seem like it is impossible to win as the good gay, while remaining truly "good".
It is simply too weird to me, that everyone knows about the Crooked Man except for Bigby. It is sometimes as if he appeared in the world the same day the player starts the game. He can be really surprised by obvious things, which is sometimes infuriating but is overall just a good guy, beat up by life, but still trying to do the right thing. Seemingly the only person in the story that tries for it truly, if you choose to.
In more realistic story, where the Fables community is really not that big, The Crooked Man should be the obvious point to start the investigation. If Bigby is the sheriff and community is so small, he really should have known the main players of the dark side of their "town". In most noir stories the detective usually knows the city and its people, but Bigby is more like a fish out of the water character, just cause the player needs to be surprised.
The other thing that is sometimes bad, but sometimes good is the audio. There is a lot of really weird, stocks sounds. Like Bigby sounds when he is in wolf form. It sounds ridiculously bad and out of sync. But then again, the music is kinda good and voice actors do the heavy lifting where the writing fails.
The game also does not always allow you to do a lot of the gameplay bits, where you are checking things out on a body or crime scene etc. You will randomly pick a thing to look at and it will just initiate and scene ending cutscene and you can't go back, even if the situation clearly allows Bigby to spend more times on the subject.
I guess in the end I did not find too many things I did like. The story plays is safe, each episode has a 1-2-3 construction with a clear beginning that sets up the main thing in the episode, by-the-books middle and a ending that resolves something, but opens something else up.
The game ending cliffhanger was something interesting since it was a small thing, but was pushed too hard with the flashbacks. I do not like when writers think less of their audience and fell the need to explain everything so hard.
I expected much more form the high scores, but I guess I forgot that most of gamers haven't read a book in their life. So they might be impressed by a story that repeats the basic instructions from a screenplay writer guide 5 times in 20 minute episodes like it is a sitcom, but a serious one, cause everyone complains all the time. I get enough of people like that in my life, don't need to deal with them in the game too.
