Wolves in the Walls review: elegant crafted and emotionally warming

One of the most rudimentary ways to direct attention in VR, where users can turn and face in any direction, is to blacken out space around an intended focus point. It’s pretty easy to know where to look when there’s nowhere else to look other than globs of black nothing. This common technique is how Wolves in the Walls begins—with the figure of a young, cute, bulbous-headed girl named Lucy appearing in an empty expanse. The blackened space draws our gaze to her colourful character design, and amplifies the intimacy inferred by the girl’s dialogue: “Oh, I drew you kind of tall,” she says, wielding a crayon. 

This line indicates the nature of our presence in this world: we’re Lucy’s imaginary friend, ushered into existence by crayon. From the opening moments of this emotionally warming experience we feel confided in and appreciated; we feel we belong. Lucy welcomes us into her space and directly addresses us throughout the 40 minute runtime, which is narrative-driven but includes some light interactive elements. In one scene we help her prepare jam by pulling a lever and placing jars on the shelf, for instance; in another we’re handed a Polaroid camera and asked by the cherub-cheeked young’un to record photographic proof.

Developer: Fable Studio, Inc.
Release date: May 17, 2019
Available on: Quest headsets, Oculus Rift
Experienced on: Oculus Rift

Of what, you ask? The wolves in the walls! Adapted from a book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (which has a Lovecraftian premise—Lovecraft having written The Rats in the Walls), the story is a “the child was right all along” mystery in which it’s eventually revealed that the protagonist’s dark fears are justified—although the wolves aren’t quite the slobbering nasty pasties Lucy envisions. At various points we observe, press up against, and go inside the walls of her house, the experience—directed by Pete Billington—shuffling around our perspective, mostly in ways that feel germane to the nature of our presence.

Towards the end of the first half (it’s split into two chapters) there’s a flashy section that changes the aesthetic to a black and white, hand-drawn look, marking the arrival of the wolves in a whirlwind montage that’s watched rather than experienced per se. But a better, beautifully integrated perspective change occurs before then, in one scene that demonstrates the sheer elegance of Billington’s direction. About five minutes in, Lucy gets down on the floor and scribbles in white crayon an outline of her kitchen, with a simple drawing of herself in it. This little drawing of her comes alive and scurries around as the “real” Lucy disappears, focusing our attention on this diorama-sized scene, which depicts an event from her past. 

Such a finely executed moment, changing timelines and textures while maintaining the spatial unity of the scene, makes standard film and TV flashbacks—also of course used to reveal details of the past—feel utterly crude by comparison. In this scene, again, our gaze has been directed by blackening out space, which may be a familiar process—but there’s nothing rote about Billington’s application of it. Sometimes an entire, detailed environment emerges from empty space (a device comparable in cinematic terms to a fade-in); sometimes only part of a scene does; sometimes everything disappears entirely except for Lucy. 

Wolves in the Walls belongs to a vein of narrative-driven volumetric experiences that offer occasional interactive elements that feel a little tokenistic (see also: The Book of Distance, Paper Giants, Baba Yaga) but add some bumpy hands-on charm. The overarching tonal cohesion of the experience, however, is wonderfully maintained, and we emerge from it feeling tender thoughts for the bulbous-headed little Lucy.