Marvel's Wolverine is out today on PS5. Insomniac Games, the studio behind one of the most acclaimed superhero game series of the last decade, has finally brought Logan to the same universe as their Spider-Man. And the first thing they did was take away everything that usually makes a Wolverine story comfortable.
There is no X-Mansion. There is no Professor X. There are no X-Men. Mutants are not fighting for a world that hates and fears them from the safety of a school in Westchester. They are scattered, hiding, and being hunted.
That is not an accident.
A World That Hasn't Built Its Team Yet
Insomniac set Marvel's Wolverine in Earth-1048, the same continuity as their Spider-Man games. In this version of the Marvel universe, three years before the events of the game, Logan walked away from Team X, a black ops unit of mutants operating under Nathaniel Essex. When the game begins, Bolivar Trask is running an active campaign to abduct and study mutants, and the only people trying to stop him are the ones scattered enough to be hard to find.
The X-Men as a concept, a school, a team with a name, do not exist yet. What Logan is doing in this game is not defending a team he already belongs to. He is doing what comes before that. He is what happens before Charles Xavier builds a place where mutants can belong.
"We wanted to remind people that existence for a mutant is not safe. It's hard. It's scary." (Insomniac creative director Marcus Smith, via TechRadar)
That framing changes the tone of every action sequence. When Wolverine's healing factor is suppressed by Trask's Ability Inhibitors, you feel it. When he takes damage and cannot recover, the game is not punishing you for playing badly. It is reminding you that mutants cannot always count on what makes them different.