Marvel's Wolverine is a globe-trotting campaign built from several purpose-made areas rather than one open map. Marcus Smith has tied that to the character: Logan is not anchored to a home city, so the game moves through a lot of smaller areas instead of one big open world. See Story and Setting.
Location | Role in the campaign |
|---|---|
The opening region. A Trask facility in the jungles of Telambang, where the Reavers are led by Omega Red. | |
Canadian wilderness | Frozen West Coast Canada, including Vancouver as a mission area. |
Japan | The narrow streets of Tokyo, and Shinjuku by name in the official location guide. The Hand are the faction attached to this part of the campaign. |
An island nation split into the Hightown and Lowtown districts, spelled High Town and Low Town in the official location guide. Trask's headquarters is in Hightown. The Princess Bar is in Lowtown. | |
Trask's makeshift town | A fake town built for one of Trask's experiments; a stealth section. |
The Essex Institute | Described in the official location guide as a remote, defensible and safe home for lost mutants in Canada. The hub framing rests on a single earlier account. |
Telambang
Telambang is where the game starts. Team X infiltrates a Bolivar Trask facility there to free Nathaniel Essex, and Logan fights through Reaver forces and a run-in with Omega Red to reach him. The area is presented as wilds around the facility rather than a settlement. See Enemies and Factions.
The official location guide describes it as the jungles of Telambang, where Logan faces deadly Reavers led by the brutish Omega Red, and lists it first among the game's four regions, ahead of Canada, Madripoor and Japan. The first launch hotfix, 1.001.004, fixed an issue where Logan would not slide under a prison door there, the first official mention of a specific Telambang set piece. Post-launch guides list the region's three main missions as Back in Action, A Debt Repaid and Last Meal; see Missions.
Canada
The frosted Canadian wilderness is one of the game's headline settings, and Insomniac has been specific about where in Canada it is. Marcus Smith has ruled out Alberta directly and said the game is mostly West Coast, and has confirmed outright that the team decided to use Vancouver for one of the mission areas.
Landmarks identified in the extended gameplay footage back that up: North Vancouver, the sulphur pile on the waterfront, Canada Place, the Vancouver Lookout at Harbour Centre, and Squamish named on highway signage. Smith confirmed the sulphur pile directly, noting how confusing it is to see a giant yellow pile like that.
The research ran the other way round from how it might look. Insomniac chose the settings for narrative fit first and then researched them, helped by the fact that art director Gavin Goulden lives in British Columbia. One reference photograph of the sulphur pile came from an artist's holiday.
The same extended gameplay footage contains a highway set piece in which Logan rides a motorcycle through a Reaver convoy, slashes tyres, hurls enemies off the road, and leaps between vehicles while fighting Reavers and Brutes. An earlier mission set in Vancouver also features a Sentinel, which in-game dialogue presents as a smaller version of the Sentinel Prototype fought later.
Vancouver holds at least one piece of optional content of its own. A journal belonging to a character named Callisto can be read in her garage there, which is the only published detail about either her or the garage. See Characters.
Trask's makeshift town
One previewed area is a fake town Trask built for one of his sadistic experiments. It plays as a stealth section in which Logan destroys Trask's generators, moving through claustrophobic house interiors between them. See Combat for how stealth works.
Japan
Official material names the narrow streets of Tokyo as one of the campaign's settings, and The Hand are the faction associated with that part of the story. The accessibility options include a Single Language Audio toggle that swaps dialogue spoken in other languages to match the chosen voice language, which is consistent with sections set in Japan.
The country is named as well as the city. Official storefront copy lists the campaign's settings as Canada, Japan and Madripoor, and singles out the narrow streets of Tokyo as the Japanese location shown so far. Trophy data adds a bar in Tokyo, complete with a novelty toilet to set off in its bathroom, and an encounter with The Hand somewhere in Japan. That is as much detail as has been published.
The official location guide names the district: Japan's Shinjuku, from neon-lit streets and arcades to underground complexes and high-rises, where Logan faces deadly forces like the Hand and uncovers new truths about his past. The first launch hotfix, 1.001.004, also fixed an issue where Jean Grey would drop off in a mission in Japan, which confirms she accompanies Logan into this leg; see Jean Grey and Updates and Patch Notes.
Madripoor
Madripoor is the island nation whose Hightown and Lowtown districts official material now names directly. Logan spends time in Lowtown, and the chase sequences here are among the most-shown parts of the game.
The official location guide spells the districts High Town and Low Town, calls the island a disparate island nation, and places two anchors in it: Tyger Tiger's bar in Low Town, described as a safe haven for mutants, and Trask's headquarters in High Town. This wiki keeps the storefront's Hightown and Lowtown spelling, since both forms are official and neither has been used consistently.
The rooftop chase runs over railings, across gaps between buildings, and along ziplines with the markets running below. Previews describe the area as scoped up into a couple of detailed city blocks rather than an open district, which fits the game's linear structure. A glowing red trail marks the route during a chase.
Princess Bar
The Princess Bar in Lowtown is Logan's preferred watering hole and, after the first act, a walkable hub. You can explore it room by room, talk to the people in it, and find easter eggs, and it is the setting for the Never Have I Ever scene with Mystique and for Sabretooth body-slamming Logan. It is run by Tyger Tiger.
The Essex Institute
The official location guide places Nathaniel Essex's Institute in Canada and describes it as a remote, defensible and safe home for lost mutants, where Logan can take a beat to meet other mutants between fights in the wintry wilds. That is the first official description of the place. A separate pre-launch account described it as a space Logan can move through between story missions, resembling a school for gifted mutants; that account is still the only source for the hub framing, so how much of the campaign runs through it, its layout, and who else is there remain unpublished. It is the one candidate for a persistent hub outside the Nightmare Cabin that anyone has described.
Real-world reference
A separate thing worth keeping distinct: Insomniac has published an account of a location-scanning trip through Japan, taking in Tokyo, Joetsu, Tsumago-Juku and Magome-Juku, and Kyoto. Those are the places the art team photographed as reference material, and they are not a list of playable areas. The studio has said outright that the scanning also feeds locations that are fictional. Canadian reference was gathered the same way, around Squamish, North Vancouver and Whistler, and Vancouver as it appears in the game is described by its own art director as an artistic rendition rather than a reproduction. The trips themselves are covered on Cast and Crew.
Nightmare locations
A separate set of spaces sits outside the campaign's geography. Nightmare Doors transport Logan to a dreamlike cabin and then into timed trials that reimagine real locations from the game as vertical dreamscapes. They reuse the world rather than adding to it.