Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries

I wanted to love this one. The city of Ulrica has a haunting, washed-out Victorian splendor to it, clockwork machinery laid over crumbling stonework like a fever dream, and the lighting through both the snow-dusted streets and the warped forest sections carries a natural, quiet magic. The soundtrack earns its place too, weaving fairy-tale motifs with an industrial undertow that keeps the atmosphere from ever fully deflating. If Woolfe were a painted storybook, it would be a beautiful one. The trouble is that you have to play it. The core loop mixes 2.5D platforming, light stealth, and axe-based hack-and-slash combat across two distinct acts: a curfew-locked city full of marching tin soldiers in the first half, and a spiky, moving-platform-heavy forest gauntlet in the second. On paper that sounds varied. In practice, the axe combat reduces almost immediately to mashing the light attack until enemies stop moving, with a heavy attack and a special-meter ability that are both too clunky and too situational to bother with. The ground-pound rarely connects where you aim it, boss scripting misfires with uncomfortable regularity, and a stealth mechanic that is hard to execute in a 2.5D space mostly just exists. Depth perception on the forest jumps is a genuine problem the camera does nothing to solve. The story wants badly to be American McGee's Red Riding Hood, with B.B. Woolfe recast as a steampunk corporate villain who has industrialized the town and replaced its workers with tin soldiers. Red herself narrates constantly, sometimes in rhyme, sometimes in modern-day quips, sometimes in broken self-pitying monologue, and the tonal whiplash is exhausting. The antagonist never speaks a single line. The Pied Piper shows up, Red has a long one-sided conversation with him, kills him, and then finds a letter that conveniently answers every question she had. The writing is the kind that reaches for dark and lands somewhere closer to unintentionally funny. And then it ends. At two to three hours on a relaxed run, possibly ninety minutes if you skip cutscenes, this was always planned as Volume One of two. The developer, Belgian studio GriN, closed down in August 2015 citing poor sales and the sequel was cancelled outright. Rebellion later acquired the IP and delivered Kickstarter backer rewards, but Volume Two will never exist. What you are buying is half a story with no resolution, from a studio that is no longer around to patch the collision bugs, the checkpoint-before-enemy spawns, or the cutscene audio that keeps playing if you skip ahead. For the right kind of curious player, at a low enough price, there is something worth a single afternoon here. The world design is genuinely handsome, the fairy-tale collectibles add small scraps of lore that hint at a richer mythology, and the soundtrack deserves better than the game surrounding it. But anyone expecting tight combat, a satisfying arc, or a story with an ending will find Woolfe a beautiful box with almost nothing inside it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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