Long Card Road Home: Blood of the Werewolf

You ever play a game and think to yourself 'Man, I bet these people wish they made Castlevania?'

This is one of those games. I mean, it even has the medusa heads. Right off into the first level I start thinking - this jump arc is weird and it feels kinda floaty, and then the bats which act like medusa heads show up and I'm thinking oh god no this is going to be right into castlevania.

Then one of the loading screens read 'what a terrible night to have a curse' and my brain just starts screaming 'People who learned the wrong lesson from retro gaming! Wrong lesson! WRONG LESSON!' and then it just gets worse and worse. This game didn't get me to record setting install / uninstall, but man at moments it really did try hard. Nothing is ever going to beat Guardians of Graxia on that, though.

Keep beating it hard, Guardians of Graxia. Not even sure I'm remembering that game's name correctly, and I don't care, since anything with Graxia in the title is probably terrible anyway.

Blood of the Werewolf is a platformer in line with Castlevania by way of Super Meat Boy and whichever classic game had transforming between mother and werewolf mother. It also kinda makes me think of Megaman. Oh, no, it makes me think of Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. I was initially sort of interested in the game because part of my brain thinks the classy dame protagonist, who is also a werewolf, will not be exploded Super Meat Boy style. See, Super Meat Boy can be chewed up and exploded because he's a man of meat, and They Bleed Pixels was only a little disturbing since it is intentionally supposed to be some sort of occult dream. Blood of the Werewolf has a classy dame on the screen who is then violently exploded by a Sonic the hedgehog crusher trap.

I have to admit, maybe it makes me a big sexist moron, but seeing the lady I'm playing getting pulverized into a giant blood explosion kinda disturbs me a little. I know. I'm a bad person. I kinda thought this was going to be more artistic, less 'hey do you remember the platformers from the 80s' and I'm like "hey, I have ROMs of those, I beat them years ago I don't want anymore please stop"







Basic gameplay is a mishmash of elements which may or not may not contradict the setting, the style or cause cognitive dissonance as you try to reconcile the themes together. The game is trying to cover a set of bases that seem to include Castlevania, monster B-movies and of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog. There are also designs and themes rather shamefully homaged from basically any platformer you can think of.

Well, I don't think I saw any Bonk's Adventure callbacks, but maybe I just didn't play far enough.

You get two forms in BotW, one half of the game is in wolf form, other half is in humanoid form. The main character is somewhere between surprising and disappointing. The good: This is seriously a game about a werewolf mother looking for her baby. That's about as rare as it gets. Her character design is excellent, but that kinda leads to the bad: She has a huge rack and is wearing heels. The hell? Platforming in heels? I can forgive the matronly lycanthrope bust, but that's just weird. I like her dress and her hair though. The voice actress is good too, though she doesn't talk during gameplay, which was sort of weird.

The ugly: She is violently murdered on screen. That ... I could do without.

In human form you have a weird floaty jump and a crossbow, which you aim twin-stick style. It is somewhat difficult to aim while doing jumping puzzles, but it is nice to be able to shoot basically everywhere. You aren't forced to shoot where you're headed, which is really cool, and if I was better at using the twin sticks with jump and shoot I'd probably have found the game a bit more enjoyable. I'm not, though, but it's a good system. It is sort of amazing, when you think about old school games, just how much more you can do with a "simple" gamepad now.

Wolf form is a bit more brawl-centric, with a pair of super moves and a big meaty bite or claw attack. You also get a double jump and I really have no idea why the wolf gets a double jump, but it just does and we'll live with it. Wolf areas and human areas feel a little different, but you generally encounter the same stuff and just deal with it at range or up close depending on which. One thing the game drops the ball on is the werewolf just doesn't feel that much more powerful than the human form. You actually end up wishing you were the human in parts where you're the wolf, and that just seems off.

The platforming is alright in parts, and pretty bad in other parts. The jump arc is weird and floaty, and just ends up feeling off. You get used to it after a while, but it never really precisely great. The death trap dodging stuff feels oddly in slow motion, and the game has Castlevania style knock back in spades. I'm not big on knock back and I'm even less big on enemies hitting you for damage outside attack animations. Enemies in this game also take way too much damage, as a basic issue, requiring like six crossbow rounds which is just too many seconds spent standing in place at best. It's especially when you're doing this mid-platforming, it goes right into being tedious and more frustrating than anything. There is a reason most of the old school platformers didn't have enemies take six shots to kill unless they're a mini-boss, and that is boredom. The wolf has attacks that confer invincibility frames, which don't one-shot all the basic enemies, so you end up stuck inside them and scampering off before you take damage and they don't even flinch.

I realize this is "how it was" but it is so disconnected and jarring in the modern day in HD. You jam yourself into a gargoyle and he makes no reaction at all as you're knocked back flying a couple seconds later. Enemies just take so much damage, even in wolf form, a great number of the platforming sections you have to pull off three jumps to chain hits on them to get them down. It just feels like missing animations and tedium.

Regardless, after just under two hours of play the game just doesn't feel like it is worth continuing. The core elements, other than the shooting style, are pretty run of the mill. The combat is worse than They Bleed Pixels and the platforming feels a little worse than Giana Sisters. The art style is good and bad, on the same screen, seemingly at random. Some stuff looks great, other things, shamefully generic or like they're from the wrong game. The audio work, sound effects and the like, are good but the music is atrocious. That's the only real standout element of the game, other than deeply direly wishing it could be Castlevania. "Deeply derivative with awful music and a cool protagonist" is not really a great tagline.

As a set of improvements I would offer that the game needs a little more breathing time during levels, more 'simple' stuff to break up the constant puzzling platformer combat sections that alternate, and really needs better music. A couple speedier bits would have been good - much like Retrovirus, the game can do stuff like that, but it chooses not to because I have no idea, though maybe there was more later. It would also be nice if the levels felt like something. They're just random collections of screens with no real theme or structure, which makes me wonder why the levels are quite so jammed together. The music alone being decent would probably have made the game worth finishing for me, but it is just so terrible I couldn't keep playing. It's like a 25 second loop of just spooky sounding noises.

Also, the game could step back a little from Castlevania elements. Just a bit. No one liked medusa heads.

Not really a terrible game, but not all that exciting either. You could do worse. You could also do better. If you have a good gothic album to listen to, turn the game's music off, fire that up and the game might be quite good but I couldn't think of anything.