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?

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.)

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!