Bigby Wolf can’t catch a break.

Try as he might, it seems the sheriff of Fabletown does more harm than good. Granted, his reputation precedes him (his name is The Big Bad Wolf, after all) but in a struggle for redemption, it’s hard to turn a villain into a hero.

But Bigby isn’t a villain. Nor is he an aspiring hero. He’s just the voice of the player, the protagonist of Telltale’s ongoing fantasy series, The Wolf Among Us. The tale is that of a neon-soaked New York circa 1980, with a detective noir story out of the harshest mid-40s pulp. The catch? The players are all drawn from your favorite childhood fairy tales.

While Shrek took the likes of Pinocchio and Snow White and gave them a raunchy, adolescent treatment for laughs, The Wolf Among Us (which finds its source material in the Fables comic series) paints a stark and unfriendly world of vice, crime, and prostitution. The place they inhabit is very real, and the problems they inherit are just as dark. Fairy tales have always existed to pull us out of reality, but this is the product of what happens when we yank them out of the fantasy. Here, things don’t end happily ever after.

In my five hours of experience with the first two episodes of The Wolf Among Us, something has hit me in a way that I couldn’t quite connect until now. In watching the player-character of Bigby try to extend a comforting hand and seeing a crying child recoil in terror, the amount of pathos that exudes from the bold, cel-shaded visage of the sheriff stung deep. Telltale is well known for their excellent writing and staging for a reason: these moments can, and effectively do, hit hard.

Similarly was the dramatic reveal at the end of the first episode, Faith. Without delving into spoilers, the moment comes so jarringly that you can only be left breathless as the credits roll. The very real attachment, and subsequent sense of loss, reached beyond the television screen and punched players personally, a Red Wedding of videogames.

Game of Thrones does, in fact, share a lot of themes with The Wolf Among Us. Westeros is a land of deception and corruption not unlike Fabletown. Mortality is fleeting and fragile, and neither universe wants you to forget this. But amidst the grim overtones, there are heroes. There are good guys. And then there’s Bigby.

Bigby is flawed. We love flawed heroes. We need flawed heroes. As an audience, we appreciate seeing someone not necessarily get everything they want, but never sacrificing their humanity in the process. Life is a balance, and there’s something relatable about seeing someone fall down every now and then, if only to watch them pick themselves up, and know that we can too. For The Big Bad Wolf, maintaining his humanity is a very literal struggle of keeping the animal inside from getting out.

The beauty of fantasy is that we can visualize what happens when the beast is unleashed, which tends to be a very difficult genie to return to the bottle. In reality, we can fly off of the handle in a fit of rage, and the collateral damage is sometimes not necessarily as visible as, say, a wolf clawing his way through a lumberjack’s face. But the theory is there.

The dialogue choices present the abstractions of reality in a very manageable way, taking the red-and-blue world of Mass Effect a step further. Sometimes, people are stubborn, and sometimes unjustifiably so. When someone throws a verbal barb at you, how do you react? You can give in and snap back with a clever retort, but in the end, is it worth the few moments of satisfaction? In the real world, this gets you nowhere, and Telltale has a signature way of slamming you with something that isn’t necessarily so obvious in real life, with a gentle on-screen notification that “this character will remember what you said.” Oof.

Alternatively, you don’t stop trying. You know when to stick it out, and when to walk away, sometimes through a sea of jeers. This may not procure the information you need as efficiently as you’d like, but it chalks up another point in the long-term goal of maintaining your goodness. It’s easy to despair in the grim painting of Fabletown, and to feel like the world is already gone so far down the tube. But why contribute to the darkness when you be an unwavering voice of hope? The Wolf Among Us comes with a conscience in the form of certain characters, particularly apparent with Snow White and her overt approval or disapproval of your actions. But when you’re left to your own devices, how good of a moral compass have you devised for yourself?