New studio, new season: can Telltale’s return to Fabletown blow our house down?

Plenty has changed in the world of Fables during the six months between The Wolf Among Us and its sequel. It’s now winter. Snow White has replaced her former boss as deputy mayor of Fabletown. Bigby Wolf has been temporarily relieved of his duties as town sheriff, and forced to attend an angermanagement group, as the result of a violent altercation with a certain tin man and a scarecrow. It’s at this point that he meets a non-fable (or “mundy” as they’re known here) detective called Faye, who asks him for help on a case. “This time around, New York City plays a much bigger role in the game,” Telltale CEO Jamie Ottilie tells us. “Bigby will struggle with where he fits in the two worlds.”

Plenty more has changed in the real world during the almost ten-year gap between the original release and the launch of its successor. Not least, of course, the demise of Telltale as it was. Malibu-based publisher LCG Entertainment acquired the rights to most of its intellectual property in 2019, and quickly revealed it was beginning work on the Telltale sequel for which most players had been clamouring. Yet it was a controversial announcement given the circumstances of the original publisher’s demise: the end came swiftly and suddenly, with many employees let go without a severance package. Ottilie, for his part, said, “Give us some time to ramp up and then judge us by the work we do, not by a past over which we had no part or control.”