The Wolf

This game is part of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. The competition requires games to have a tutorial and to be gentle for beginners, but to have substantial puzzles.

The game casts you as the Big Bad Wolf, in prison, and you have to account for your actions from your own perspective. It reminds me of classic takes on this subject like the movie Hoodwinked or the children's book The Stinky Cheese Man. The writing is humorous and fun to read.

The map is small and simple to follow, mostly shaped like a cross with a branch on one of the sides. The game draws on Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, Peter and the Wolf, and others.

I found many of the puzzles enjoyable and engaging. The game is relatively brief, just right for beginners. I would give 4 stars, but I had some parser wrangling issues. I frequently found that the limited parser felt like it made the game more complicated rather than less; for instance, TAKE is blocked, but many puzzles revolve around using items that are present. So a puzzle that would be very simple with TAKE becomes a complex guessing game of what the correct verb is. Similarly, some of the puzzle logic felt out of whack; actions that I thought would be reasonable are handwaved away, but later turn out to be the right solution, it just wasn't the right time (I'm specifically thinking of the (Spoiler - click to show)sheep disguise).

These issues were not severe and were overcome in the end, but gave me enough friction that it was irritating. The writing, however, was very funny to me, and provided me strong motivation to go on. I also didn't find any bugs or typos at all, and the game overall felt highly polished. I was planning on giving it 3 stars and saying I'd give 4 if the issues above were resolved, but I can't really think of any way to fix them myself, so why not just give the higher score for this fun and well-written game?

This Inform 7 game is a really fun take on the fairytale theme where you play as the big bad wolf, being interviewed by the police and coming up with an alibi for all his alleged crimes!

I really liked the design of the tutorial - there’s an in-story introduction and a special tutorial character who is later brought back to provide hints if you need them. The tutorial itself is thorough and provides a good explanation of every common command - there’s also a handy ‘commands’ meta-command that lists every verb you need to get through the puzzles, which is a nice short list due to the game’s limited-parser design.

The puzzles are straightforward, generally well clued and nicely pitched towards beginners. I only needed to use the in-game hints twice; they helped in the first instance, but there seemed to be a slight bug with them in the second instance and so I had to resort to asking on the Discord. In both cases, I was stuck because I hadn’t re-tried a command after a circumstance had changed - I felt this could have been marginally better clued, but perhaps it was just me not being thorough enough.

Great game overall – I love the fun premise!