Quick Look: Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries

Since I have a crush for fairytales, I’ve been dying to play a game centered on the Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. I got my wish with the latter since Telltales, but I’m still waiting for my cute little Red Riding Hood game.

Well, technically I’ve just got it thanks to the folks at GRIN, but their Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries game is still in alpha stage. I’ve been following this game since its successful Kickstarter campaign last year, and now that I had the chance to play it for a bit, I can confirm that it has great potential.

I’m going to start by letting you know the thing I like most about Woolfe and one I somewhat dislike and wish developers will improve in the future.

As I’ve mentioned, Woolfe has been published on Steam Early Access, so it’s still a work-in-progress. The thing I like most about it is that, even in this stage, the artwork is jaw-dropping.

I reckon that I’d expected the artwork to be pretty nice from a platformer that allows you to play The Red Riding Hood, but now that I’ve seen it, I’m really in love with this game.

Now something that I felt needs a bit more work: the textures. They need a lot more polish because they don’t look good enough when the camera makes close-ins to objects (i.e. food & drink baskets). I noticed a few bugs and glitches as well, but hey, it’s alpha so I won’t mention anything about it here.

The music fits perfectly with the atmosphere and the fable story. I hope for more variation, but in the same style. The only thing I can complain about here is that the music is still stuck in my head like a song that I heard from a music box in my childhood. That shouldn’t be a bad thing unless it happens to you when you have to work.

That cape

Moving on to gameplay, Woolfe is a 2.5D platformer that becomes a hack “n’ slash platformer after about 20-30 minutes of play. The Red Riding Hood that you get to play isn’t the cute innocent girl we know from fairytales, because this is not a fairytale (no, really, it is not).

GRIN’s Red Riding Hood is older, sexier, darker and merciless with her enemies. Speaking of which, I’m not going to say anything about the story because spoilers, but I just want to say that it got me really hooked. My only fear is that people are going to play it just for the plot and not experience the other aspects of the game at their fullest.

Joke aside, I’ve been really impressed by Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries and I strongly recommend anyone to purchase it when it gets released in March.

You can even support developers by buying it on Steam Early Access and I’m not talking about giving them money, but also the much-needed feedback.