The Wolf Among Us: Faith

The game's visual style is even better in action than in preview. The color palette and character designs leave 'The Walking Dead' in the dust. Some lighting issues persist, such as the hard fall-off on Colin's pig pink skin, and some decals ignore lighting information and occlusion in a distracting manner. I think they missed with the Snow White design, but most of the characters come alive with or without glamour.

Painfully though, performance problems and seemingly poor animation interpolation were standard in my playthrough. Some Branching conversations tended to hitch at each important decision, and often made character animations during conversations jarring.

Combat was generally better, but one chase scene loaded so unevenly,that the first dodge (a door) did not come into proper view until after it was time for the next.

The game's soundtrack does a great job of selling the mood. The voice acting is good to great, but can feel disjointed when the player activates the same clip, a classic adventure game flaw. Small, quiet environments don't offer much surround wise.

While the audio was not as troubling as the video in terms of hitching performance, there was at least one load screen that began playing the audio several seconds ahead of loading in a cutscene. Such issues left me wondering if the long load screens were going to ruin each next scene.

Telltale has got something with 'The Wolf Among Us,' a fresh property and stylized noir trappings that should grab a lot of fans despite the lack of zombies. Even so, this first episode feels like a prologue that just gets some characters set up before touching on a mystery. Hopefully, Telltale can do something to address the long load times and hitching performance so that more people can properly experience 'The Wolf Among Us.'

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