Portrait with Wolf

Portrait with Wolf is a poetic game. Or, a collection of smaller games. When you open it, you have a one-room game and a standard Inform header but with Info for a different game. You have 4 choices you can select from. Choosing one of them gives you a brief ending, then reboots to a new miniature one-room game with four choices.

The choices have different words each time but represent CAT, TURNIP, BOOT, and ASTRONAUT. Wolves are also a recurring theme.

After making 6 choices, you are given an ending. How much of different choices you've made affects which ending you get.

After collecting all the standard endings, you can go on to get a few more complicated endings. I played until I was able to unlock all the GUIDE options.

I had a great difficulty grasping onto anything in this game. I was initially quick to choose and quickly read text, to see what my choices would do. I chose TURNIP repeatedly. Would the game get more turnipy? It was hard to tell. I tried an all-astronaut run. Did it change anything?

I thought, "ah, okay, I need to recalibrate. It's more of a poem than a game. The four options represent themes."

So I went back and tried carefully reading the text to identify themes. I didn't realize at the time that I had gotten into a different 'series' of poems, so I was reading new material, but I was eager to find out what each of the four things represented. Are turnips innocence? Are astronauts loneliness?

I couldn't identify any pattern. At this point I was beginning to sweat. Did I just misunderstand? I checked IFDB. Mostly 5-star ratings, with a single 1-star. I checked intfiction: people saying it's one of the greatest games they had played. I checked Discord: people saying that they could never do better than this. At this point, I am in complete panic. Is there some key to this I'm just not grasping? What am I supposed to be seeing?

I tried decompiling the game to see how to achieve endings, and realized I hadn't noticed the first word in Series VI. I then found the source text publicly available and read through it. I read the guides, and saw the nice art.

I still can't get a handle on it. I can't grasp on to any overall themes or strategy. Maybe the idea is that everything is a fake choice and it's all wolves and you're assigning different names to them? But I don't see how things tie together. If you took all the openings of each mini-scene and the endings and separated them into two different piles of printed cards, would someone be able to say, 'oh, yes, this ending clearly goes with this begining'?

So maybe it's meant to be complete abstraction, a word poem Rohrschach test that just reveals something about the reader. That may be possible, but I had difficulty finding a reflection of my self in the words.

The mystery of the game kept me going through all endings. This is not a bad game. It's well-polished, sincere, full of intent, and a unique reflection of the author's inner self. I am glad for the time spent on it. But it's not something that satisfies me, and I don't think that's the author's fault; I think that something of this type could never have satisfied me to begin with. I considered not posting this review at all, as I don't believe it can help advise the author, but another purpose of reviews is to share in the community of overall players and to give others something to compare their experiences to. Leaving a medium rating also may not feel satisfying, but what I want this rating to represent it is "I valued this experience but I had a mixed reaction to it and would expect others to have a wide variety of reactions to it as well."

Given its overwhelmingly positive reaction by most others on IFDB, intfiction, and discord, I expect I just missed something obvious. If someone wants to comment and say, "You missed the part in the intro where they explain that each scene corresponds to a different Buster Hudson character," then I would really appreciate it. Otherwise, this is how I feel.

I should say that this author in all his games has the highest quality of programming and UI and has great word choices. Great care goes into everything. One of his games (Repeat the Ending) is one of the most highly regarded games of this decade by several metrics. And this game is well thought-out. My reaction represents a mismatch between my expectations and desired features in games and the authors intended artistic vision.