Fables is a sprawling series of comics filled with centuries of lore and backstory, and The Wolf Among Us serves as a prequel of sorts. It's set in the 1980s, years before the first issue of the comics, and follows just a handful of the more important characters. (There’s an in-game encyclopedia that provides more backstory on characters and locations, and a third of all players read each and every entry.)

The game puts you in the role of Bigby Wolf, the sheriff tasked with keeping order in Fabletown, an urban refuge where fairy tale creatures hide in plain sight using magic spells called glamours. Throwing a bunch of century-old, magic-wielding characters into modern life creates quite a bit of drama: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum have become gangsters, Beauty and the Beast are having marriage troubles, and one of the flying monkeys from Oz has turned into a drunk. At the center of all of this turmoil is Bigby, who was once the scourge of the fairy tale world as the Big Bad Wolf, but now spends his time keeping Fabletown in order.

Then a severed head shows up on his doorstep.

Your influence is felt through your choices

This sets up what turns out to be a big, complicated story with lots of moving parts, though you don't really have any influence over how things play out. Despite being a detective story, there's very little detecting to do in The Wolf Among Us. Just like The Walking Dead, the game is largely an interactive narrative, with lots of dialogue to read through and some light action scenes to break up the pacing. Your influence over the game is largely felt through the choices you make, like whether you go investigate one potential lead at the expense of another, or if you use your fists to beat clues out of a criminal instead of talking it out. Bigby’s main job isn't to figure out what exactly happened — the story is largely linear, and the main plot points unfold without your help. "Really, how you behave while that's happening is what you're in control of," says Bruner.

This setup works mainly because Bigby is such an intriguing character. As the Big Bad Wolf, Bigby has a certain rage that always seems to be just beneath the surface — when things get really bad you can see it physically, as he transforms into an actual wolf. And the game gives you plenty of opportunities to explore this dark side. In fact, in many instances it feels like you're not-so-subtly being pushed to do something terrible. In one early episode, I made Bigby actually tear someone's arm off after a heated bar fight — which involved a disturbingly long sequence of button presses — and every time I saw that character later on his stump was a painful reminder of what I did. There's no question that by the end of the game you'll save Fabletown. But can you do it without making everyone despise you? (Of course, there’s always the option to replay the episodes and see how things could have played out.)