Guise of the Wolf Review – Beast of Burdens

So, I’ve reviewed quite a number of games in my time here at Twinfinite. Some have been great, some have been not-so-great, but they’ve all shared a pretty important, consistent feature: playability. I’m not talking about precision controls, great story, or any of the things that pile on to take a game from “working” to “enjoyable” – mean the most fundamental form of functionality, the ability to open the game and, after some probable loading time, play it as it exists. Guise of the Wolf is unique in my experience if only for its inability to successfully deliver this, which makes it a very difficult title to review on any other merit (or shortcoming).

I’ll start with an admission of personal guilt that’s tied to some of this. I’ve got a pretty small, low-resolution monitor. It’s nowhere near up to the task my graphics card is, and this detracts from games sometimes. However, they’ve all still worked, until now. The first time I fired up Guise of the Wolf, I was presented with about 1/4 of the title screen. It wasn’t even enough of it to be able to see or interact with, say, the ‘Play’ button, or anything else. I tried fiddling with the Steam launcher settings to no avail, and finally ended up perusing the game community and found that I wasn’t the only one experiencing these issues, and FUN Creators had promised that the issue would be resolved “in a couple of days”. I thought that was odd, but fair – as long as they were taking steps to resolve it, I could set it aside and work on other reviews. Cool. Fine.

I kept on coming back after those couple of days and finally, about two weeks later, the menu was usable. I was excited! I jumped in, got over some initial confusion, and got the hang of it pretty quickly, but then I ran into yet another resolution-based issue. While the game seemed to run fine, and I could see what I assume was everything in my field of view, my in-game menu was still ‘blown up’ to unusable proportion. I could read my journal notes, as useless as they happened to be most times, but saving, loading, and using most of my inventory were right out, and maybe even more. I tried to soldier on despite this, but frankly, without much direction and no way to access most of my inventory, I simply couldn’t find ways to progress. It’s kind of hard to get ingredients for a potion together when you can’t get to the ingredients you’ve collected to that end — if, indeed, those were what I was collecting. I’ll never really know, since so much of the menu wasn’t there.

As far as positives go, the art style was pretty cool, if not really anything new or exciting. The story sounded like it may have some promise, though what I ran through was riddled with unskippable subtitles and poor voice acting, as well as being basically directionless and confusing. I would have loved to give Guise of the Wolf a more complete once-over, but the fact is that the technical difficulties have weighed on too long – even after being ‘fixed’ – and I’m convinced at this point that I’ll never get a real chance to play through this title. It’s a meager $14.99 via Steam, so it’s not a big investment, but unless FUN Creators can fix the issues with it and deliver a more functional game, I’d definitely stay away.

Final Breakdown

[+Nice visual style] [+Intriguing story] [-Massive technical issues] [-Confusing, directionless gameplay] [-Poor voice acting and dialogue]