Recently we’ve ventured into a genre that I haven’t had too much exposure to in the past. The English “Graphic Adventure” doesn’t translate very well, but the German Wikipedia term – Point&Click – somehow doesn’t fit either. So let’s find out what it is and how I found it in this (spoiler-free) article.

Spoiler-free is not that easy, however, because the game essentially lives from the story it tells. It is based on the fact that many of the characters known from fairy tales were brought into the real world (I don’t know exactly how) and now have to live and survive there. In order not to be discovered by humans, they live in a neighborhood called “Fabletown” and use magic to give themselves human appearances. The story begins with one of the “Fables” (fairy tale characters) being murdered.

We as the player now control Bigby Wolf, the big bad wolf. In the real world, he takes on the role of the sherif and now has to solve this case. He receives support from Snow White (Snow White) and looks for evidence, interrogates suspects and collects all sorts of information. In addition, decisions have to be made in many places; these affect both the short- and long-term reactions of the other characters and, for example, their opinion of us and their willingness to help. You often have to make compromises here: what pleases one person can annoy the other very much.

The game is structured in episodes: we have to play a total of five chapters, with a brief summary of the previous events being shown at the beginning of each chapter; at the end you see your own decisions listed again with a comparison of how other players have decided. We already knew that from games like “Life is Strange” and for me it’s one of the highlights of each chapter.

But unlike “Life is Strange,” this game did one thing: take your decisions seriously. Every choice we made had serious implications for the game – even the ending depended on how you decided on seemingly small things in the beginning. Especially in the last scenes, this led to a kind of inner justification in the sense of “I couldn’t have known that back then”. But at the same time it was a very interesting feeling because in the end it wasn’t an excuse – you had made your decision and now you had to live with the consequences. I thought it was great!

Now that we’ve talked as much about the content as I can without spoilers, let’s get down to the technical level. As already mentioned, I don’t think the genre “Point&Click” fits at all – I played it with the controller, there were some quick-time events and the flow of the game also felt more like an adventure game – but all this is absolutely positive, I liked it a lot.

The graphics, on the other hand, took some getting used to. It didn’t take a long time to get used to it, but I was a little surprised at first. Despite its release in 2013, the game only had an aspect ratio of 4:3 and was heavily cell-shaded. It’s a style I didn’t like at all in games like Borderlands. In a rather slow game like this one, however, it hardly bothered me.

Otherwise, not much can be said about the technical side. The environments were often designed in great detail and I really liked the characters and their facial expressions. The sound was way too quiet, we had to use some tricks to hear anything at all. And towards the end of the story, unfortunately, we had several bugs that made us have to restart the game over and over again. In the end, this didn’t stop us from playing through, but it did get us out of the flow of the game one or two times – thank God it was saved often enough automatically.

Overall, I really enjoyed the game. I will definitely play similar games from this developer (Telltale Games). I intentionally mentioned as little of the story as possible so that you can still play this game – it definitely has a recommendation from me! Even if you’ve watched my run on stream, you should try it. Maybe you make completely different decisions and experience a completely different story?

What do you think of the game? Was it interesting to watch? Will you play it yourself or maybe even played it already? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!