howling dogs

by Porpentine profile

Secret
2012

Web Site

Return to the game's main page

Reviews and Ratings

5 star:
(42)
4 star:
(46)
3 star:
(22)
2 star:
(6)
1 star:
(3)
Average Rating:
Number of Ratings: 120
Write a review


Showing All | Show by Page


- caligula jones, March 9, 2024

- Beable, November 12, 2023

- Edo, August 17, 2023

- Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA), July 27, 2023

- Bell Cyborg (Canada), July 21, 2023

- Cody Gaisser (Florence, Alabama, United States of America, North America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Known Universe, ???), July 5, 2023

- ilyu, May 25, 2023

- Hugginnn, April 20, 2023

- Kastel, April 14, 2023

- Bloxwess (Bellaire, Texas), November 8, 2022

- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), October 11, 2022

- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 23, 2022

- cat, August 1, 2022

- VanishingSky (Nanjing, China), July 30, 2022

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Beautiful and haunting work of hypertext fiction, May 31, 2022
by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina)

When I finished this game, I was left absolutely speechless. I sat at my computer, just sort of letting the experience soak in. I finished the game a few weeks ago, and I'm still trying to gather my thoughts on it. While I don't have a cogent or coherent interpretation yet on what I think the game means -- and the work does warrant this level of thoughtful, reflective engagement -- my initial impression has persisted: this is a stunning work of hypertext fiction.

The work has a game-like setup, but ultimately plays like a story on-rails. The player occupies a barren prison with a few rooms, which, in its eerie desolation, reminded me of the empty barracks from Steve Meretzky's Planetfall. In the initial interactions with the game environment, Howling Dogs could play out like that IF classic, with machines still dispensing food long after other life has moved on. Instead of exploring an expansive abandoned space station, though, the player in Howling Dogs remains confined to a small cell and a few adjoining rooms, one of them containing a VR-like device that sends the player into a variety of strange scenes, some familiar and others fantastical.

There's some branching, but (it seems like) most of the links add details to a scene without leading the player down many drastically different trajectories. After each session in the VR contraption, the player wakes up again in the prison, a day (or more) having passed and the cell becoming more and more unkempt. Part of the beauty of this game is in its design, which effortlessly communicates this tension between confinement and escape that's core to the message of the narrative. The player feels hopelessly lost within a narrow cell, despairingly constrained in world-bending simulations that transport across time and space.

Those simulated sessions constitute the bulk of the gameplay. Each session is both distinct and part of a larger whole, each an intricate verse in an expansive poem. Each node in these visions is made of arresting passages. I won't detail any of the scenes because winding your way through each session is sublime, but here are a couple sample passages plucked: 1) "sometimes the smoke is high enough to be mistaken for the sky, sometimes it collapses low as a cavern"; 2) "We saw its spirit ascend with the morning light, and from its grave grew trees of dizzying height, and the fruit was birds, one of each kind of bird in the world. Your zoo now has one of each kind of bird in the world."

Overall, this work reads more like a work of hypertext fiction than it plays as a game, but it is a testament to what can be done with text and links.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Zape, November 13, 2021

- Sarah Mak (Singapore), July 21, 2021

- bkirwi, May 25, 2021

- TheBoxThinker, January 26, 2021

- Wynter (London, UK), January 17, 2021

- Urithor, January 4, 2021

- autumnc, September 11, 2020

- Rainbow Fire , August 28, 2020

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Already a classic, April 1, 2020

Once you understand the way to "escape" (by eating, drinking and entering a virtual world) the room in which Porpentine locked you up, you experiment various lifes, which are maybe the same, as seen by a disturbed mind... A brilliant illustration of the Twine games potential.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Sammel, March 21, 2020

- Ry (Philippines), September 30, 2019

- Bartlebooth, September 21, 2019

- Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands), July 9, 2019

- Steffan LW Sitka (Los Angeles), March 3, 2019

- IanAllenBird, January 26, 2019

- Woof, January 21, 2019

- Snave, October 30, 2018

- Jaxcap (Arizona), August 12, 2018

- Dawn Sueoka, June 20, 2018

- ikkinlala, June 16, 2018

- Stas, April 1, 2018

- Aryore, March 24, 2018

- maya surya, February 1, 2018

- Dominia, December 23, 2017

- enkaye (usa), September 1, 2017

- Wanderlust, August 3, 2017

- gilhova, July 27, 2017

- mirandamiranda, June 30, 2017

- John Ayliff (Vancouver, BC), March 28, 2017

- TheAncientOne, January 28, 2017

- SLane, January 27, 2017

- hoopla, November 2, 2016

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
.., September 14, 2016

This is one of the most influential twine games by the amazing Porpentine. It actually took me a while to play this game because it's quite long and I think the first time I played this I also, believe it or not, got lost somehow. It was one of the first twine games I've ever played but gave up several times because I always veered off somewhere else and accidently restarted it. But one night, I said to myself, "I've played all the other Porps, so I should finish Howling Dogs."

I won't be saying anything much different from anyone else. But this game is quite bleak, but yet so tender to the touch, so freaking beautiful. The magical realist universes you transport into, so small but yet so well built, as you leave some sort of galactic prison. Like, other than novels, this is one of the most moving pieces of text I've read. I also give a star for that Kenzaburo Oe quote.

Pros: Thick and bleak Sci-Fi. Time Travel.
Cons: May be too long for some. It doesn't deter from the story in my opinion but people who aren't use to playing Twine games might find it tiresome?

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Dense and somewhat haunting., August 19, 2016

It's difficult to know what to make of howling dogs. It is written well, the imagery it evokes is poetic, almost to the detriment of story, but it is certainly affecting.

I've played through it twice now, and gotten both endings, and to be honest I still can't tell you exactly what it is about, not fully. It is not a story, so much as it is a semi-interactive piece of art, and as that it succeeds very well... I suspect that I will still be thinking about this game long after, something that I can't say for a lot of games that I enjoyed a lot more than this one.

Many other reviews talk about how much this game has to say about women, and looking back that is definitely a theme running strong within the disjointed scenes. Equally fascinating though, as with much Art, is how much of what you see is what you brought with you. In my first play through, it never occurred to me the protagonist might be female. It also never occurred to me that the prophet was a "joan of arc" figure, as in my mind they were also male.

Reading it the second time, I projected a female PC, and a Joan of Arc figure, and it worked equally well - the writing is beautifully designed that way, to magnify your own prejudices and allow you to see your own reflection.

I play for enjoyment, and I didn't enjoy this a great deal, hence the 3 stars. It was confusing, it was confronting, and as Art it succeeded in unbalancing me. It was quite well done.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Horace Torys, July 27, 2016

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Bold, weird dreaming through hypertext innovations, July 18, 2016
by Wade Clarke (Sydney, Australia)
Related reviews: choice-based, IFComp 2012, Twine

(I originally published this review on 1 October 2012 as part of my blog of IFComp 2012. This was the 1st of 26 games I reviewed.)

I thought that kicking off my IFComp 2012 quest with a hyperlink powered game à la howling dogs might somehow ease my brain into the gear required for the more typically strenuous parser fare to come. I was wrong; howling dogs brought the strenuous straight away. This piece is an ominous and often perplexing journey through poetic language, virtual reality-ish dreaming and shifting female roles. Beyond its subject matter, it also forced me to immediately confront a bunch of issues concerning different kinds of interactivity in text games I'd rather have put off until later. howling dogs is dynamically beautiful and writerly, but I would point out now for consumers that it is essentially not a game-state game. It's a text with many digressions and some strong aesthetic tricks. It's also pretty weird. To learn more, you may read beyond this paragraph into my more content (but not puzzle) spoiling territory.

The player's initial situation is sparse and sparsely depicted. You're trapped in some kind of quarters with a shower, food, a room whose nature screen keeps you sane, and the 'activity' room where you can go to have virtual reality experiences that aren't of your choice. By the bed is a photo of a woman you once knew. Ultimately the only thing you can do to escape each day's monotony is plug yourself into the activity room. In each of the ensuing virtual realities you seem to be a different person in a different situation, and at the conclusion of each dream you wake up back in your quarters.



The scope of the dreams (and I use the term loosely – there's no certainty that they are dreams) is wide ranging, to say the least. There's a gory phantasmagorical war produced by some entity which bends slightly to your resistance – or lack thereof – to its choice of material. There's a Zen experience involving describing a garden viewed through a paper slot. The ultimate, lavish scenario follows the growth of a prophesied empress with a bone foot.



The series of shorter dreams which come first and flit about in subject matter seem pretty resistant to interpretation on a first play, but the later and longer scenarios start to draw out a theme of the persistent and constricting roles for women which have been laid down over the ages. In one story you're Joan of Arc waiting to be burned. By the game's end you're an empress, arguably powerful but still bound to various aesthetic and behavioural expectations, deciding which masks to wear and which of various predetermined actions to take. The empress story reminded me of some of Tanith Lee's books; Vivia (about an impotent vampire princess) and Law of the Wolf Tower (the adventures of a harried quasi-princess teen). The game's final quote from John Wesley about the indefatigable evil of angels also reminded me of Lars Von Trier's film Antichrist and its concerns with myths of the perpetual evil of women.



These are my ideas and not stone, for this is plainly a game open to wide interpretation. I describe it as dynamically beautiful as it demonstrates a perfect sense of timing and flow in its aesthetics. Not just in the language but in the visual delivery of the game; the pace at which the text appears, the moments the game chooses to repeat things. Some tricks it has which are minimally visceral, like lines which fade or flicker like a broken light, weird links hidden in punctuation, deliberately blurred text. This is some of the most interesting use of this hyperlink format I've seen to date. However, I rarely found much use for the 'Rewind' link, having much more luck with my browser's 'Back' button, and occasionally the need to drag the mouse back and forth over links became laborious – particularly on one rather amazing screen which apparently leads to an alternate ending. I was unable to find that ending, but the need to repeatedly move between links in the text and the 'Back' link which kept reappearing in the corner was more than my RSI could stand.



howling dogs was a very interesting and promising introduction to this year's competition for me, and also demonstrates further innovation in the area of hyperlink pieces. The writing is fine, the dynamics excellent, the imagery clear and strange.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- LayzaSkully (Italy), July 15, 2016

- Lucas Brook, May 13, 2016

- Teaspoon, April 13, 2016

- E. W. B., February 23, 2016

- Kevin Snow, February 15, 2016

- Hannah Powell-Smith, February 4, 2016

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A sci-fi imprisonment game showing the power of Twine, February 3, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

Porpentine is currently the best writer of Twine fiction out there. Howling dogs is perhaps her best work. This branching, non-linear long game is a far cry from most twine games, and in fact better than most parser games.

In howling dogs, you are imprisoned in some sort of futuristic cell. You alternate between boring, daily life and brief trips in a VR machine. The trips become more and more complex, and have deep underriding themes about inevitability and restraint.

I only got the bad ending at first; I didn't realize there was a good ending until I read the reviews. To get the ending:(Spoiler - click to show)On the page with tons of links, one link will give you the good ending. It isn't random, but plot related.

I recommend this game for everyone.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Fantacide (California), January 14, 2016

- underrh, January 4, 2016

- Onirim (Argentina), December 26, 2015

- branewurms, December 24, 2015

- Brendan Patrick Hennessy (Toronto, Ontario), December 8, 2015

- Cat Manning, November 17, 2015

- verityvirtue (London), November 1, 2015

- Trobairitz (USA), October 28, 2015

- KingofSushi, October 12, 2015

- Shayrenn, September 19, 2015

- Julia Myer (USA), July 16, 2015

- Serge Kirillov, May 24, 2015

- chux, May 20, 2015

- Sobol (Russia), April 14, 2015

- Simon Deimel (Germany), March 13, 2015

- Deka, February 22, 2015

- Matt W (San Diego, CA), February 18, 2015

- morlock, February 7, 2015

- Floating Info, January 1, 2015

- CMG (NYC), November 7, 2014

- IFforL2 (Chiayi, Taiwan), November 2, 2014

- Joshua Houk, October 18, 2014

- boxesoffoxes, April 20, 2014

- sleuthly, April 2, 2014

- Molly (USA), November 29, 2013

- kala (Finland), November 23, 2013

- Nick Keirle (London, UK), November 17, 2013

- Hannes, November 16, 2013

- Laura Michet (Los Angeles), November 15, 2013

- grainne6, October 29, 2013

- Sdn (UK), September 28, 2013

- Jim Kaplan (Jim Kaplan has a room called the location. The location of Jim Kaplan is variable.), July 11, 2013

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Stories within stories, June 29, 2013
by EJ

(This review was originally posted as part of the 2012 Semi-Official Xyzzy Reviews series, and focuses on the game's nomination in the Best Story category.)

howling dogs is an interesting choice for Best Story, because at first glance it doesn’t precisely have a story. Not a single story, at any rate. Rather, it has several disparate narratives contained in a fairly loosely sketched frame.

The frame concerns a person trapped in a cell of some sort experiences the other stories as virtual reality scenarios while their (her?) real-life surroundings slowly decay. For company, the protagonist has only the photo of a woman–a former lover, perhaps–who becomes harder to remember with each passing day. Besides the gradual deterioration of the cell and the protagonist’s memories, not much happens in this layer of the story–which is probably the point.

The VR-scenario stories start short and simple and get longer and more involved as they go. The first, in which the player must choose to describe a garden from one of several different perspectives, is almost more the kind of thought-experiment you’d expect to find in a philosophy text than it is a narrative. Then there’s a memorably chilling piece in which a woman decides to kill her romantic partner (having been driven to the act by an incident a year before which is never specified) which takes an interesting approach to the question of player complicity. The narrator in this section is an “I”, not a “you”, and while the player may choose to condone her actions or not, she’ll carry out her plan regardless. The next is an especially odd piece involving a soldier involved in a surreal battle who may reject this reality in favor of an equally surreal peaceful teatime; after that is a well-written if somewhat standard take on the trial of Joan of Arc (or someone very like her).

The stand-out, though, is definitely the last and longest one, the tale of an empress who has been trained all her life to eventually die in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This story manages to fit a lot of worldbuilding into a small space gracefully enough that it doesn’t feel forced or confusing, and the world it paints is fascinating. It is a world of living cities that grow like plants and plains full of buried gods and bone-footed empresses who seem to wield supreme power but ultimately do not own their lives or their deaths. We follow one of these empresses through her youthful lessons in how to be beautiful in the face of her inevitable assassination. We see her come into her power and decide how to deal with several situations that require her attention. Then we are transported to the eve of the assassination–which, as it turns out, is not quite so inevitable as one might think, as long as the player is paying attention. If you play your cards (or click your links) right, the empress can decide to go against the fate that has been determined for her since birth and fight back against her would-be assassin. It’s a storyline that’s exciting on a surface level, but also laden with all kinds of deeper resonances regarding women and power and appearance and societal expectations, and the execution is fantastic on both (all?) levels.

The empress story is also the only one to explicitly relate back to the main storyline, as towards the end (in the “good” ending) the lines separating the VR scenario from the frame story’s reality begin to blur; the empress is identified with the frame story’s PC, and the woman who aids her in escaping assassination is identified with the woman in the photograph. The empress’s escape becomes the protagonist’s escape.

So the parallels in these two stories are made fairly explicit, but what about the rest? Do they hang together, or is howling dogs really as fragmentary as it first appears? Well, some of them are a little harder to figure out than others (I’m still not sure quite what’s going on with the battle/teatime episode), but there are strong thematic connections running through all the disparate parts of the piece. Gender and the position of women in society is one of the most explicit concerns of the piece, clearly visible in the stories of the empress, Joan of Arc, and the woman who kills her partner. In addition, there are themes of figurative and literal confinement present to some extent in nearly all of the stories (including the frame, but excluding the bit about the garden), appearances versus reality (which is inherent in the entire concept of VR as well as appearing in many of the sub-stories), death and decay, and probably many other things I haven’t noticed yet. For all that it’s short, it’s a dense piece of work, the kind that offers up new discoveries each time you go through it.

The individual parts of howling dogs are fascinating and they come together into a cohesive whole better than one might expect. The game may lack an overarching plot in the traditional sense, but it still feels like it’s telling a single story through different lenses. The fact that its approach to story is unusual for IF only makes this layered and thought-provoking work that much more memorable.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- Robb Sherwin (Colorado), June 21, 2013

- Aaron (Lille, France), May 18, 2013

- Squidi, May 13, 2013

- baywoof, May 13, 2013

- absentsock, April 27, 2013

- Dr. Fleming (Torrent, Valencia), April 14, 2013

- Tortoiseshell Bat, April 7, 2013

- schifter (Louisville, KY), April 7, 2013

- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), February 19, 2013

- Anya Johanna DeNiro (Minnesota), February 16, 2013

- AADA7A, February 9, 2013

- Paolo Jose Cruz (Manila, Philippines), January 31, 2013

- zylla, January 8, 2013

- Buttfort (Pensacola, Florida), January 5, 2013

- Artran (Taipei, Taiwan), December 6, 2012

- Nusco (Bologna, Italy), November 20, 2012

- Danielle (The Wild West), November 20, 2012

- liz73 (Cornwall, New York), November 17, 2012

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 17, 2012

- Edward Lacey (Oxford, England), November 16, 2012

- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), November 16, 2012

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 16, 2012

- Squinky (Canada), November 16, 2012

- thealexray, November 14, 2012

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Deep and affecting, November 12, 2012
by Yuna
Related reviews: IF Comp 2012

Hypertext fiction has a lot of differences from standard IF, most particularly in that it is interactive without letting the reader actively determine the course of the story. Twine fiction, in particular, frequently gives few choices about what happens, instead relying upon the medium to slow down the pace of the story. Even the illusory decision-making involved in deciding in what order to read various passages can be powerfully immersive when handled well.

howling dogs is handled well.

There's not much that can be said without spoilers. It at least appears that the protagonist is (Spoiler - click to show)in some kind of hospital, possibly a mental ward or even a prison, and is being "entertained" (if you could call it that) by a series of virtual reality experiences.

The longest and most intriguing section concerns (Spoiler - click to show)a child born with a bone foot, whose deformity marks her as the heir to the throne. After disturbing and intricate lessons, she ascends to her place, makes several political decisions, and finally attends a celebration of her rule. A strikingly vivid picture is painted of a superstitious society focused on tightly-defined roles and individual pleasure, and there is some quiet horror in walking through the life of its most tightly defined member.

Many different conclusions can be drawn. But howling dogs is a powerful, creative, and effective use of the Twine medium.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

- merritt kopas, October 12, 2012

- perching path (near Philadelphia, PA, US), October 12, 2012

- ifwizz (Berlin, Germany), October 7, 2012

- aparrish (NYC), October 6, 2012


Showing All | Show by Page | Return to game's main page