I can fairly say you shouldn't into a fairy tale: Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries

Yes the icon appears to be off her lower half

Copyright law and free use are always the strangest things to muse on. People get very upset when you "rip off" ideas that, you know, they perceive as you ripping off. If a game or design principle came before, then it's a little interesting how little that actually matters in the face of a more popular game, or the more popular story.  Free use, and things going into the public domain, is sort of the opposite. Since everyone tends to know, you end up having a ceiling over your work.

What I'm getting at here is that Woolfe wants to be a fairy tale modernization, which it sort of manages, but there's an inherent limitation in choosing to be such a thing. You instantly put a low cap on your work, as old fairy tales are rarely remembered as anything all too special. It becomes trite and cliche without even getting a chance to explain itself. Maybe it's not so bad to get your foot in the door, but I don't feel like the game's art really needed that. Becoming instantly mundane doesn't seem like a good trade off.

This does look awesome

Woolfe is, before I get too far into assessments of the core tenets surrounding how its design looks, basically a rehash of Blood of the Werewolf, which is pretty unfair to both games but saints does it ever feel the same. That isn't to say it plays the same or looks the same, but about four minutes into the dismal sewer level (why?) I start flashing back to Blood of the Werewolf. It is, however, different in essentially two categories. Woolfe is a "sort of" 3d platformer, for better or worse. It also involves combat that makes me long for the combat in blood of the werewolf, which is about the most damning thing I can say about a game not bringing up Dark.

(Interesting point - the game is developed and published by "Grin" who are not "Grin". Just saying. I don't think this is intentional.)

sewer level why

Ok so basic run down: Woolfe is a 3d platformer with melee combat. It is conceptually derived from Red Riding Hood, except Red Riding Hood is recast as a platinum blonde teen or maybe tween in a corset, wearing high heels up to her knees, making her look rather trashy and generic. I mean, I guess I'm being a little unfair because it's a nice looking design, but what exactly is the point? Is that creative? It reminds me of looking at people "redesigning" Superman or putting a hoodie on humanized MLP characters or drawing their OC making out with characters from their favorite anime. It's very generic, it's just "Dark fantasy" and then you sort of scribble it on an outline for a fairy tale. I feel I'm going to see the deviantart watermark at any moment.

You know what would be cool? Like, dark fairy tale mixed with say 70s Blaxploitation style, or maybe like 80s iconic cars or a loving homage to 90s neon as Double Dragon Neon did. Or at least, could be cool. I'm sure there's people who are impressed with Red Riding Hood mixed with porn star through the lense of anime, but it isn't me.

I guess I'm being really unfair, but seriously, it's just so hard to move past the generic looking visuals coupled atop the generic sounding sound track. The game does have a lot of voice acting from whoever does Red Riding Hood. Or Red Hood. Or Jason Todd. Or whatever I'm supposed to call this hip "re-imagining" or "loving homage" or ... Ok, sorry, I'll focus. I can't find the name of the actress who does the voice acting, but she sort of half-rhymes her way through much of the game. Her voice work is good, but there's weird tonal jumps that make you twitch. She'll be discussing the dismal fate of her parents and then suddenly she's cracking jokes about how it smells or talking about how she likes animals.

So her narration is good, and I actually really like the idea here especially, but the execution leaves a little to be desired. Better understanding of tone would help, mostly, but the video game generation is a little weak on understanding tone.

The game's visuals are, as I said, generic. But fundamentally good. It has no real style of its own, it looks sort of like "dark" and then "fairy tale" if you put it into google. I'm not even kidding here, google "dark fairy tale" and you will find various pieces of artwork that look like they "inspired" this game. I actually keep thinking of the Maiden in Red design in Betrayer, which wasn't a great game, but the Maiden in Red design is fantastic. The Maiden in Red also had, you know, not heels on. The game is attractive to look at, and I always appreciate snow effects, but the engine is not well used.

For one, the physics can not be properly implemented. You can jump onto enemies and then hang in the air, or hang on the edge of objects. Enemies, as an aside, can hit you while you're floating on their heads, which is rather strange in action. It also feels rather slippery, though I suppose given her groan inducing footwear maybe she isn't getting enough traction. Sometimes stuff bounces around, or just feels weird.

Pathing is also a little odd, and things do not have the weighty feel I would prefer they did. It is a bit unfair playing this game alongside Space Marine, but seriously, when you have an example in your face of how things could and then you play this ... Yeah, it's not good.

Basically you have a good engine, with well done assets and nice environments populated with on the most part interesting looking characters and then it just doesn't quite click together. Sometimes bits of Red will clip through her cloak, or you'll float on an enemy or slip off something and just think ... Yeah, just not quite.

The core platforming, while floaty and feeling a bit odd given the visuals, is both good and bad as you go. The camera is generally 'locked', though you can slightly angle it around, which is ... Hard to explain. You are not stuck to a 2d plane, but the game locks the camera to make it reliable. When it works, it allows the game to literally have more depth and do some really neat stuff. I really like the moments where the game puts secrets in the background, then you notice where you can access the background and go hey, cool! When it isn't working, it is incredibly frustrating and gives the game that "bad Sonic" feeling but in slow-motion. I don't know how else to explain it, your perspective just lags behind and I'm like "oh yeah, like playing awful DIMPS Sonic games!"

Speaking of Sonic, the game has two "goes fast" sections where you run against the screen, so to speak. They should have taken combat out of this game and instead added more of these tracks. The usage of the locked camera shines here and while the tracks could do with a little more zoom out, so you can figure out what you're doing, I actually had fun with them. All two of them!

Outside of these sections, this is a strange compromise, and a difficult one to dissect. It might be more of a classical approach to 3d platforming - it isn't behind the back, as later Sonic and Mario things were - but I honestly never played much of the transitional period of 3d gaming. Like I said, when it works, it's great. When it isn't working, it is pretty bad. It goes from working to not working and back again very quickly.

The music is awful. It seriously sounds exactly like I'm listening to Blood of the Werewolf, this sort of droning ear ache that goes on and on in the background. I'm not sure what it is supposed to sound like, beyond the spirit of music lying down and dying. Or maybe the spirit of music lying down after eating too much in the way of ... You get the idea. There are a couple jumpier tracks here and there, but on the most part it sounds like someone typed in 'generic fairy tale music' into youtube and then found the first open license results.

It's kinda funny looking at this game and listening to this game right after playing through Super Metroid. Looks worse, sounds much worse, in spite of Super Metroid being  a 16-bit pixel game made twenty years ago. Platformers always make me compare them to retro games, because platformer was once a ubiquitous game type of that previous era. And they're always worse than games made in that era. But seriously, the music is awful, and what is the excuse? You didn't want to pay for a decent composer?

The game also does "that thing" where it does cutscenes right after a save. I just can never figure out what the deal with this is. Do people not play their games? Is there basically zero playtesting? How can anyone possibly want to have to skip a cutscene over and over again as they nail down a difficult moment? It also doesn't save very often. There's a pretty reasonable amount of checkpoints, and the levels aren't overwhelmingly long, but sometimes you have to do stuff and re-playing the dull bits isn't much good.

So is this game any good? That's not a tricky question. There's some talent in the production; the voice acting and environments are good, and pleasant. I really like the narration concept in action, while it pushes away from the idea that the character is meant "to be" the player, it gives Red stronger characterization than the traditional lazy platformer shit. Some of the platform puzzles actually feel pretty good, especially in the weird broken apart nightmare forest, but the physics aren't great and feel rather off. On the other hand, the music is terrible and the story is so painfully generic you find yourself skipping cutscenes less than an hour into the game. The first boss' model is so mediocre it kinda takes you out of the moment. Characters don't seem to blink or have working lip synch.

Basically, while I think the narration is good, nothing she is narrates is interesting and the game just doesn't excel at anything. It didn't need combat at any point in the game and the art style is woefully generic deviant art tier. There's potential here, and maybe if they manage all the episodes of this work they'll progress to "doing it right" but I doubt they're getting there.

Also it ends on a cliffhanger, because of course its episodic - I mean, you would totally know that from the title, right? (I didn't, and most of the game's reviews didn't either)