The Story So Far: Fabletown, Glamours and the Case

Every noir lives or dies on its world, and The Wolf Among Us Remastered owns one of the best ever built: a Manhattan where fairy tales are real, hiding in plain sight, and hiding badly. This guide covers the story's foundation — everything the game expects you to absorb in its first hour, laid out so the mystery's later turns land with full weight. Spoiler discipline: this page covers setup only, through the opening murder that starts the case; episode-specific turns belong to the chapter guide.

The Premise: Fables in Exile

Centuries ago, the fables — the heroes, villains and talking animals of every story ever told — were driven from their homelands by a force called the Adversary. The survivors crossed into the mundane world and built communities in hiding, the greatest of them Fabletown: a neighborhood in 1980s Manhattan where Snow White works city administration, the Big Bad Wolf enforces the law, and Boy Blue might pour your drink. The arrangement holds on two fragile pillars — secrecy, and the truce that lets former enemies live as neighbors.

Secrecy is enforced by the Laws: fables who cannot pass as human must stay out of mundane sight or buy glamour — the magic that makes a toad look like a man, a pig like a tenant. And glamour is the story's quiet masterstroke: it is expensive, it is rationed, and its economy creates the desperation that noir runs on. The fables who fled endless kingdoms arrived in New York with nothing, and the community that promised everyone a new life delivers some of them tenement poverty with a magical black market bolted on. Fabletown, in the game's own imagery, is an immigrant story wearing a wolf's coat.

The Sheriff

Bigby Wolf is Fabletown's sheriff, and the game's central irony: the most famous predator in all storytelling is now the cop protecting the community that fears him. He smokes too much, lives alone in a broken building, and carries the full weight of who he was — the huffing, puffing, house-blowing wolf of legend, trying to be a man the fairy tales can call instead of run from. His authority is loose ("I'm the sheriff. I'm the law."), his methods are the question you spend the season answering, and his temper is a mechanical fact: the game repeatedly hands Bigby moments where violence is a choice, and remembers the pattern.

Around him stands the supporting cast the story runs on — Snow White as the deputy mayor's capable, complicated right hand; Ichabod Crane as the deputy mayor himself, all procedure and no spine; and the community's margins: a toad landlord who cannot afford glamour for his son, a bar run by a woodsman with a famous axe and a drinking problem, the strip club where the town's oldest professions wear new faces. Every one of them has a story the original tells, and the remaster's rebuilt art gives their tenements and bars the grime the writing always implied.

The Case

The season opens in that world with the genre's oldest engine: a body. What begins as a domestic disturbance in a run-down apartment — an argument, a protective neighbor, a familiar face from a famous story — becomes, before the first episode ends, a murder investigation that exposes Fabletown's glamour underworld to anyone paying attention. The victim matters; the way she mattered matters more; and the trail Bigby follows runs through the community's black market toward the question underneath every noir: who profits from the desperate?

The season's five episodes — Faith, Smoke and Mirrors, A Crooked Mile, In Sheep's Clothing and Cry Wolf — take that case from street level to the power structure hiding behind it. The chapter guide covers each episode's events, decisions and turning points in detail; the choices guide covers which decisions shape them.

What the Remaster Adds to the Story

Nothing changes — and that is the point. The Wolf Among Us Remastered presents the original season with rebuilt visuals, modern performance and the complete five-episode run in one package, plus Noir Mode: a black-and-white presentation that pushes the season's detective-film DNA to the front. Players who lived the story in 2013-2014 will find their Fabletown exactly where they left it, rendered better than memory; players arriving new get the definitive telling of a story that has only improved with age — a story about immigration, poverty and who gets to be human, wearing a fairy-tale overcoat that fits more tightly every year.

FAQ

Do I need to know the Fables comics? No. The game stands entirely on its own and explains its world as it goes. Comics readers will recognize deeper cuts — the Adversary backstory, character histories — but the game's story is self-contained.

Is this a sequel or the original story? The original season, remastered. The Wolf Among Us Remastered is the complete 2013-2014 five-episode run — the sequel, The Wolf Among Us 2, is a separate future release.

Why is the game set in the 1980s? It carries over the comics' choice — the era's grime, neon and noir iconography suit the material, and the original art direction (and the remaster's rebuild) leans into its rain-slick streets and sodium-lamp glow.

How dark does it get? Genuinely dark — the season deals in murder, exploitation, addiction and poverty, with violence that earns its rating. It is noir first, fairy tale second; that inversion is the appeal.

Where do the big choices come in? From the first scene — The Wolf Among Us Remastered is built on decisions, timed and otherwise, that define Bigby and shape the case. The choices guide maps the ones that matter and what they change.

Fabletown has been hiding in plain sight for centuries. On October 29, you get the badge.