The Wolf

Sometimes you just look for an author you're pretty sure you'll like, to make a good start in reviewing a comp. Leo Weinreb in was my choice for TALP 2024. He wrote A Walk Around the Neighborhood, which had the really clever device of talking to your significant other, who calls out progressive hints exasperatedly from the next room over. And your friend Tonya helps you with the verbs you'll need to complete the game, even with a tweak for if you toggle the tutorial after it's over. It's the sort of humor that jibes with me. So this all jibes well with TALP/TALJ's purpose.

And about the only problem I had was, The Wolf felt generic as a title. The main character, however, is quickly revealed as definitely not a bore, for better or worse! The Wolf spins together several fairy tales everyone knows and probably doesn't want or need to hear again, at least as a stand-alone, and the result is a pretty snappy game that makes those old stories new.

You're a wolf, see, and you just aren't the violent type. Honest! But still, you're in the police station, undergoing questioning for several murders. If you-the-reader know your fairy tales, you can guess most of them.

But you're not a murderer. So you say. You're a building inspector (how freelance your role is, is not revealed,) and boy do you like to capitalize on any pretext whatsoever to go inspecting buildings. It's not that easy, though. People don't let you in.

It's a slightly absurd assumption, but then, these are fairy tales, and it pulls them together well. There's a shepherd boy who will call you out, a girl with a red hood, and three pigs. There's a fisherman, too, and I confess I blanked on the reference. But it added nicely to the story.

I think the pigs puzzle was particularly clever and fun. The first house is easy to blow down, but the second needs a little work, and you need trickery to enter the third.

*The Wolf* does a great job of following the constraints of the comp and using them to sharpen its focus into something funny, the sort of simple but effective twist on a premise I as an author am a bit jealous when other people find. No "Oh, I'm reimagining fairy tales and passing it off as my own stuff" here. The wolf is a delightfully shifty character, and I found myself almost wanting to believe it, not just because I played through as the wolf, who's ostensibly made a lot of trouble, but because the natural human inclination is to believe an exciting lie over a boring truth. And I've been in my own situations where I felt weird explaining myself, and I was innocent, honest I was. The end result is an almost plausible story, one certainly more believable than the fairy tales that feel run-down when referred to the Xth time.

So there's that humor there but the reminder, too, that we do love to be suckered in by a good story. While some of the text described disturbing things, the humor meant that it wasn't until I looked back on things that I thought of that angle, how we can believe people we dislike if they just have a good exciting story. It's both disturbing and funny, thoughtful and full of action.

(Originally written during TALP 2024, touched up during TALP 2025.)