Along with the first season of Tales from the Borderlands, 2013’s The Wolf Among Us is my favorite of Telltale’s many classic narrative adventure games. Which is why when a second season was first announced in 2017 — yes, it goes back to The Before Times — I was as excited as anyone else. But as you may recall, things got messy after that. Not just because of a global pandemic, but because Telltale imploded in 2018 before being revived in 2019 — at which point The Wolf Among us 2 was re-announced.
So yes, if you’re keeping track, this sequel has already suffered a studio closure, two announcements, and then, after all that…it disappeared. At one point, AdHoc studio — the ex-Telltale folks who brought us last year’s tremendous Dispatch in the same narrative adventure genre, but that fell apart.
In came additional developer Trick Studios and publisher PM Studios, and the project is finally back on track. But there was yet another complication: the work that had been done was on the Telltale Engine — yes, the same framework that was already obviously creaky and flawed back when the original iteration of Telltale was still putting out games on the Xbox One and PS4.
Fast-forward to last week’s Summer Game Fest Showcase and The Wolf Among Us 2’s THIRD reveal. The difference this time: they actually showed the game behind closed doors as proof of life. Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s real, and it’s now running on Unreal Engine 5. It still retains the same comic book-style look the original did, but it’s running on modern tech that should result in clean performance on most platforms. Oh, and while The Wolf Among Us 2 will still be structured episodically, it will be released all at once as one single 8-12 hour game.
Gameplay-wise, it’s going to feel familiar to anyone who’s played the first season of The Wolf Among Us — or any other Telltale game, for that matter. The sequel is set six months after the conclusion of the original, and our hero Bigby Wolf finds himself the hunted rather than the hunter, on the trail of a serial killer but two steps behind.
My demo scene found Bigby with a detective named Faye investigating the apartment of their prime suspect. Faye finds a note on a strange stone table in the middle of the apartment — a note with Bigby’s name on it. She immediately questions Bigby, wondering if he’s involved. This prompts a dialogue choice — they’re a staple of Telltale games and they will absolutely play a prominent role in the sequel. I chose to deny any nefarious intentions, which she was naturally skeptical of.
Still, that eerie note left Bigby thinking that the killer knew they’d be coming, and he suggested to Faye that they get out of there immediately. Faye agreed, but as they headed for the door, the door slammed shut. It’s magic, Bigby tells a disbelieving Faye.
From here you get to explore the apartment with a bit more freedom than we’ve had in past Telltale games. The camera goes over Bigby’s shoulder and you can search for additional clues — not to mention a way out. A closer look at a bookcase with a series of half-pulled-out tomes. One poem-related puzzle later and you’ve opened the secret door, which itself yields a clue needed to show you the correct symbol to arrange with three plates on that weird middle-of-the-apartment stone table.
It was a short demo — not to mention a very early one. There were missing dialogue-choice prompts and placeholder VO, but as The Wolf Among Us 2 isn’t due out until sometime next year, it didn’t really matter. At this stage, what matters is that somehow, The Wolf Among Us 2 is still alive, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
