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Is the next member of Congress a werewolf? Can you survive a lycanthrope's bite? There’s no silver bullet for winning an election!
"Congresswolf" is an interactive novel by Ellen Cooper, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based--140,000 words, without graphics or sound effects--and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." -- James Bovard
When a werewolf murders your boss, you must step up to run a Congressional campaign all on your own. While werewolves, protestors, and worse--the media--lurk around every corner, you'll use everything you can to get your candidate elected.
Email servers? Tax returns? Who cares. Election-season secrets and October surprises are nothing compared to the possibility that your candidate might be a werewolf...or that you might become one yourself.
• Play as any gender, play as gay or straight
• Set the right tone with your TV ads
• Prep your candidate for debates
• Impress big donors
• Get out the vote
• Find out who killed your predecessor
• Decide where your candidate will stand on werewolf rights
| Average Rating: based on 4 ratings Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 1 |
So this game is better, I think, than its steam reviews would suggest. A few people seemed to have bombed its reviews over there. But its not perfect.
The writing in this game is descriptive, and I could picture all the characters clearly. You play as an aid to one of 4 different congressional candidates. Unlike other games that play it a bit safer, this one uses real life US parties (Republican and Democrat). It doesn't seem extremely biased one way or another; someone mentioned the game as treating Republicans as 'evil' but I chose a Republican millionaire and the game seemed just fine with that choice.
In this game, similar to Werewolves: Haven Rising, werewolves have been around for a while and are subject to harsh restrictions on their freedom.
The main threads of the game are:
-Deciding to do a dirty or fair campaign fight
-Making a decision about how you feel about werewolves
-Dealing with the aftereffects of a grisly murder
-Running a monthly budget
Someone said on Steam that the game seemed to assume a female protagonist. You can choose your gender, but some scenes in the game do feel written for a female protagonist in mind. For instance, there is a frightening scene where the protagonist (major spoilers for the middle of the game) (Spoiler - click to show)is being followed on a dark street alone at night, and is attacked in an alley by a werewolf, and is worried for about a month afterwards so it can see if they turn into a werewolf at the next full moon. Its easy to see this as an analogy for (Spoiler - click to show)rape and possible pregnancy, and that's not a theme that's very common in other media (except for the (Spoiler - click to show)Alien series). But it worked for me, and I don't see it as a drawback.
The biggest drawback I do see is that the narrative arc is relatively flat. I didn't feel a real build-up in tension in any of the main plotlines, although there was some there. The overall writing level was great, though, and I felt like my decisions definitely mattered. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to fans of werewolves, political games, or simulation text games.
I received a review copy of this game.