Game Reviews

Red Riding Hood and the Restless Wolves

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Red Riding Hood and the Restless Wolves

Dear Whaleo,

After spending just a few minutes with Red Riding Hood and the Restless Wolves (which I'll call RRH from here on), it's pretty clear that your game has been made by a team or an individual who genuinely means well but is incredibly early-on in their game-making career.

And, after spending some intensely frustrating hours wrestling with almost every aspect of RRH, I felt compelled to be a bit more direct in offering advice on a few of the things you really should fix in your game.

Unfinished... sympathy

First, we need to get this out of the way: to be as polite as possible, in its current form, RRH is fundamentally flawed in almost every significant way.

It's great that you've taken some inspiration from Limbo, adding a few splashes of colour to your take on its monochrome palette.

But it seems you haven't spent enough time studying what made that game so special nor, sadly, the absolute basics that every 2D platform game like yours must get right to even be playable, let alone noteworthy.

To start with, let's look at your controls, which fly in the face of at least 30 years of convention by placing movement controls on the right, and jumping controls on the left.

This isn't too much of an issue by itself, and I understand a forthcoming update will allow players to toggle this layout should they wish.

Out of control

Such invisible controls can work quite intuitively if clearly communicated to the player, but here the lack of any audiovisual feedback or any form of reliable consistency makes it permanently unclear whether you're moving as fast as possible, or whether any slow speed is the result of a device-based performance issue.

Likewise, some environmental clues as to your character's abilities, beyond discreet context-dependent text at the bottom of the screen, would be a good idea.

The main character can triple-jump in a single bound? That would have been handy to know. Those dangling poles can be climbed? Perhaps draw some attention to that.

In RRH, more or less every challenge, whether minor or major, leaves the player in perpetual doubt of what they're trying to accomplish. Working out what I was meant to do required continual and painful trial and error.

Poor checkpointing forced me to redo large sections of levels over and over and over again, offering a gruelling experience where the juice was certainly not worth the squeeze.

Return to sender

This repetition might not have been such an issue had the moment-to-moment gameplay been enjoyable.

But consistently poor collision detection combined with your game's unreliable controls saw the pea-sized avatar under my control travelling through and within the environment or, with an awkward judder, falling off platforms for utterly unknown reasons.

I won't lie - you've got some hard work ahead of you before RRH will be in a state where it should be sold to players. During that time, study the classics of the genre and see if you can apply some of what you'll learn to the game you're trying to complete.

Best of luck,

Giles

Red Riding Hood and the Restless Wolves

In its current form, it saddens me to say that there is nothing to recommend about Red Riding Hood and the Restless Wolves, apart from some nice music
Score
Giles Armstrong
Giles Armstrong
Having worked in the games industry since 2007, Giles knows a thing or two about how good video games are made, why bad games happen, and that great games matter. A Game & Narrative Designer by day, story-based games are quite literally his bread and butter.