The Wolf of Derevnya

The game has two problems 1. Writing. In particular, the abundance of untranslated Russian words. Perhaps, they were supposed to add authenticity, but they only confuse. 2. The predictability of the plot. Unfortunately, when the main plot twist is so blunt and recognizable in the first 10 minutes of the game, the rest doesn't really matter. For a text game like this, both writing and plot issues are critical, so I don't recommend the game.

I don't typically play text adventure games, but this one is excellent. The story is engaging and the feel has just the right amount of mystery and spook. What I like most is I don't feel like I've made any "wrong" choices which is my usual worry about in these types of games.

A creative and thoughtfully written story that immersed me in the unique world. Beautiful illustrations and musical accompaniment. A perfect game to play during a cozy evening.

A chilling and compelling story. This game really has the feel of an old-school choose-your-own adventure, adding to the atmosphere with gorgeous book-like formatting and pencilesque illustrations. It's certainly come a long way since chapter 1, which I originally played when it was first released. The writing is fantastic... bone-chilling and captivating, drawing players into the mystery. I still have a lot to play through to reach the end, but I'm hooked! ...I pet the cat a lot.

A wonderful and interesting setting and perspective for a cyoa. looking forward to trying for all achievements

I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it, but I’m generally glad about playing a VN with a unique artstyle, UI, and writing that merges history and pop culture in its own way. The illustrations lack variety, but they look nice. The moody music lacks variety, but the game is short enough that it doesn’t get annoying. The UI has some annoying designs, such as a combination of requiring you to press something to speed up the unwrapping of letters, while also sometimes this can skip a page, while also this may block the text log, so you can’t see what you’ve just skipped… But it’s not a big problem. What I mainly struggle with is that the opening section is lengthy and with multiple ways to express yourself, only to then make you feel as if the writer has run out of steam, making the remaining two thirds of the game very brief and padded out with predictable structure. But that’s not at all what’s happening - in reality, the game keeps track of many different choices, and leads to interactive branches and options that it would be just unfair to expect a project of this small of a scope to treat them all with novel-worthy level of detail. Judging by the achievements, I’ve done a pretty bad job and led myself into a bad conclusion of the story. Not an especially satisfying one, mind you. The thing is I’m not exactly sure what I could have done instead. Was the way I was expressing myself with role-play intended to take me down the route I ended up with? Did I waste time by doing some stuff, because maybe I should have done other tasks? Was I too physically weak because of my choices? There are no stats displayed. Was I too trusting? There are no marks suggesting that you can succeed or fail dialogue checks. Did I fail at the minigames with tracking and stuff? Oh yeah, there are minigames, but I don’t know if they were there to be actually won - more than once I got an achievement claiming I succeeded at something, but the presented narration suggested it didn’t mean anything as it seemingly led to a negative outcome. I’d argue the game suffers from its own minimalism, one that was probably intended to support the broader atmosphere-first design. And I did enjoy reading parts in the dark, listening to the tunes, observing pictures of nature, with a candle lit. But in the second half I felt both powerless and guideless, not knowing what were the “wrong” turns I’ve taken.

Excellent visual novel! Well written, compelling and interesting characters, and a very unique art style and user interface. If it sounds at all interesting to you, I strongly recommend checking out the free demo and seeing how you feel about it!

A short choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) style murder mystery game about hunting a werewolf. The story is a bit on the short side for my taste (my first playthrough took about 1 and a half hours), but it achieves a lot within that short time. It's minimalist sketchbook style drawings and moody background music comes together very nicely to create a believable atmosphere of isolation and dread, leaving your imagination to flesh out the world from the text descriptions. The short length of the game actually works in its favour here, however, as you'd probably like to do multiple playthroughs to get the full picture of the plot. As with many CYOA games, there is a strict sequence of events and choices that you must make in order to get a good or even decent ending. It's not always obvious what consequences your actions have on the first couple of playthroughs, and some of those choices actually open up important dialogue bits that let you understand the world and the characters more, only for it to ultimately lead you to a bad end (because you missed a crucial dialogue from a different choice). Many of these choices are gated behind time sensitive events, for example near the climax of the story you have a choice to talk to several villagers, but you are not told that there is only time to talk to 2 of them, and that which 2 you talk to actually have a drastic impact on the endings. This kind of game design ultimately leads to players just save scumming to see what other dialogue was missed, or doing rapid playthroughs choosing all kinds of choices at random, basically the equivalent of pixel hunting. Either of these is immersion breaking, so I'd say, leave it for subsequent playthroughs after you (likely) found the worst ending the first time around. On the plus side, in subsequent playthroughs you're more likely to pick up subtle clues and implications of certain events and dialogue, in the same way that if you rewatch "Attack on Titan" from the beginning, you now have a huge paradigm shift as to why certain characters have certain reactions to key plot events, long before the big reveal as to the secrets they hold. I felt this was quite nicely done in The Wolf of Derevnya. As of my current plays (5 endings), there are a couple of bugs, not too severe but certainly noticeable. There was once when the game flags were likely linked wrongly, leading me to wind up in a different part of the game completely, with a dead character now alive again. A couple of endings just ended on what I presume is the final page (I wouldn't know if there were more) because the game refuses to advance further or pull up the credits page as per usual. There's also once or twice that the game refused to advance midway through the game, showing only blank pages. This was easily fixed by saving, quitting and reloading to where I left off. Overall, I'd say don't let the negatives put you off from trying this game. The Wolf of Derevnya is a very nice light horror read, and does make you feel the sense of desperation, dread and fear for characters' lives, not knowing which one will be taken out by the werewolf next. Recommended as a light filler game that you can try playing though a few times in a few hours.

I am not writing reviews often but this time I feel that this game deserves special attention. First of all - this game still has some technical issues preventing to complete it 100% usually it is iritating expierence for me but this time some aspects stops me from refunding and those are the following reasons: 1 - writing style It is definetely solid, all described details just puts this story and whole area in your head. It makes grim medieval atmosphere with unique characters. 2 - Art. Fact that some of drawings are copied from actual medieval drawings got my attention. Most important - author of those drawings is real historical figure (technically speaking - if existence of person is proofed with documents and / or ather historical / archeological evidence, that person is historical). 3 - Background of story. I can see for sure that developers had done their homework on this case. Time period of Kievan Rus and power of Novgorod city is showed in very accurate manner trough small details. Indeed small details shows big picture. 4 - developers are actually listening and communicating. Definetelly this is the biggest reason why I still have hope for this game, if someone from developers is reading this review I want to tell that you had done fascinating job with this project and I have request for you - please take your time but give us completelly finished product, at this moment game still crashes or gets frozen. When I will be able to finish this game 100% I will gladly edit this review

I like this game. yeah, I did not get the true ending and didn't get the rarest achievement. but I do like it. the way the art that is presented in the game helps sell this setting being a Medieval Russia that would not have the best of tools to make gorgeous art. I also like the other characters that are in this game as well. I will eventually get around to getting the other achievements maybe in October, I don't know.