Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names

As a longtime Werewolf: The Apocalypse enthusiast with near debilitating social anxiety, I've always been kind of frustrated with the lack of good video games in the setting. I've always been super nervous about playing tabletop games online with strangers, so licensed Werewolf games have made up the majority of my experience with the setting, and given White Wolf's notoriously spotty record of video game adaptations, there are only a handful of Werewolf games, and fewer still worth playing. All things considered, I am [i]very[/i] happy to say that The Book of Hungry Names is one of those precious few. The Book of Hungry Names is an entirely text-based role-playing game from writer Kyle Marquis of Choice of Games, a company that specializes in a sort of "choose your own adventure" style of interactive novel. Much like other CoG titles, you start off your adventure with a series of choices engineered to build yourself a character from scratch; most of your character's physical characteristics are left to your imagination, focusing instead on establishing a background and basic skillset for you to start engaging with the world. Much like the tabletop game, the actions you take succeed or fail based on dice rolls, with modifiers depending on the stats associate with whatever action you decide to take. As such, gameplay essentially boils down to understanding your character's skillset and playing to their strengths so you can survive long enough to further develop and expand on your skills. It's a fairly simplistic system, and I understand that a lot of gamers may be put off by the idea of playing what is essentially an interactive novel. That being said, I think anyone open to this kind of experience will be pleasantly surprised by the mechanical depth that comes into play when you factor in the Werewolf ruleset on top of CoG's formula. I think the most exciting feature here is actually the "convictions" you can develop over the course of the game. It's a little bit like the classic "morality meter" trope, but instead of being one single gauge that tracks how "good" or "evil" you are you get no less than 5 separate gauges tracking your attitudes on various werewolf issues like your relationship with the Garou "Litany" and your willingness to coexist with non-Garou human beings. While you are ultimately free to choose whatever dialogue options you like, regardless of whether it's consistent with decisions you may have made in the past, your convictions become a major factor in your dealings with the spirit world, as spirits react strongly to those with a strong sense of self. As such, it becomes crucial to understand your own convictions in order to deal with them effectively, as particularly strong convictions may earn you Gifts from like-minded spirits, and even determine which tribes you may eventually join. It's a rare morality system that manages to have a meaningful impact on gameplay without restricting your own role-playing potential, but The Book of Hungry Names has done it. Of course, no matter how mechanically [i]good[/i] the game might be, none of it would matter if the story itself weren't worth reading. Fortunately, Marquis has delivered a very engaging campaign which is well worth at [i]least[/i] two playthroughs. Marquis uses the established conventions of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and the wider World of Darkness setting to deliver a compelling cosmic mystery which pits you against an entity which excels at deception and subversion, capable of trapping mortal beings in illusions that cater to their own convictions and desires, and even force you at times to act contrary to your own convictions simply to avoid falling into its traps. The final confrontation is nothing short of epic, and a victorious ending feels like a genuine and [i]very[/i] satisfying triumph. If anything, I think the only thing I didn't like about this game is that it has a tendency to drag on at times, especially when the aforementioned spirits start coming into play. You can end up spending a [i]lot[/i] of time meandering about the hub town between missions just trying to make contact with spirits to figure out which ones you can actually obtain gifts from and ultimately restore the Broad Brook caern to its former splendour, and I found myself a little aggravated with the repetitiveness of it. Fortunately, The Book of Hungry Names mitigates this by making permadeath an optional feature rather than a core mechanic as appears to be the norm for CoG titles. To be clear, you can generally avoid an early game over with a decent understanding of your own skills, but given the length of this particular game, I think it's worth mentioning that you can run a playthrough or two without permadeath if you're understandably afraid of having to restart 30+ hours into a campaign and on the cusp of the final battle. In short, The Book of Hungry Names is a [i]fantastic[/i] Werewolf game, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is both interested in the setting and open to an entirely text-based game, and especially if you're a fringe Werewolf enthusiast who's been itching for a game to dip your feet into the World of Darkness.

I really wanted to give this a thumb-up; but after the crappy ending I got (see below), that pushed me to a thumb-down. [b]The good:[/b] - Respectful of Werewolf the Apocalypse lore. It's actually pretty well written, and it shows the author knows the World of Darkness very well. - The story tries to give the player freedom. You can pick the order in which you want to accomplish missions, and it slightly changes the outcomes. There are many side-missions, fairly short and easy to do. And many spirits to talk to. - The characters, friends and foes, all are interesting, with their own personality. - Very long story, with many chapters, and many choices. [b]The bad:[/b] - The choices, most of the time, won't change the pathing of the story. It will set variables to alter the text offered to you, and that's about it. Despite its many choices, and apparent freedom, the story is very linear and replayability is low. - Some choices are only there to punish the player, but the outcome is not obvious when you read the choice. There are plenty of arbitrary decisions made by the author which the game won't feedback at all. The purpose of these games is to have fun reading a cool interactive story, not get spanked because your way of thinking doesn't match the author's view. And it happens way too often in this story. - The game pushes the sale of its DLCs constantly. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense: suddenly a NPC talks about "insert DLC here"; it comes from nowhere; BUY ME! - When it was released 2 years ago, every patch deleted my save, I had to restart the game 4 times from scratch and this is why I didn't play it for 2 years, waiting for the patches to stop. I hope this won't happen to you. [b]The very bad, and what made me give a thumb-down:[/b] - At some point near the end of the game, you get dragged into the Umbra, and it can kill you if you fail two rolls (which I did, super cool after so many hours playing). Worse: If you own the DLCs, you get bonus points to pass this zone more easily! Way to punish people who didn't purchase the extra missions. This is not acceptable. So should you buy this story if you are a Werewolf the Apocalypse fan? Yes... definitely. If you are not a WtA fan? No... because the lore is never explained, and you won't understand a thing that's going on. WtA is thick in lore, and the story explains very few. You'll probably get confused.

又臭又长，写了一大堆然而故事剧情甚至都没什么进展。

Play the world's most unfortunate late-teen-to-twenty-year-old as they unravel the mystery of a lost pack of werewolves whilst struggling against modern horrors like homelessness and being poor. Several quirky and funny werewolf freaks to romance (or not, if you don't want to) including Gaia's gift to earth, Nin. I haven't finished this game yet (Though I think I'm close!), but I've played enough of it to fall in love with the writing style. It's concise and witty, and made me like Garou despite initially disliking them. If you're into World of Darkness, or WANT to get into it and like reading, this is a really good game for you.

First up let me say this is far and away the longest one of these games i've ever played. If you're a quick reader maybe 12-14 hours. Secondly is pretty dense, as in difficult to understand. This isn't my first WTA game but i struggled to wrap my head around the sheer amount of concepts and jargon. Thirdly because the central premise of the games involves something that can warp reality the narrative does occasionally suffer from lurching around jarringly. Lastly while i like the author's style and ideas i do find their own voice tends to override the characters at times. A 70 year old half-crazy warewolf probably doesn't have a favourite anime, a 40 year old media mogul probably can't quote up to date memes. The problem is that with a story this large it becomes impossible to ignore that characters with extremely different ages, lives and experiences probably shouldn't all have the same level of references and humour as their 30-something author does. All that being said this does everything i want these games to do. It's engaging, complex, reactive and interesting. Just maybe don't set out to finish it in one sitting.

После прочтения словил себя на мысли, что теперь буду покупать все игрокниги по WoD, которые выходят от Кайла Маркиза, так как он настоящий маэстро интерактивных историй. По хорошему, его бы заставить писать ВСЕ игры по WoD, потому что у него явно есть любовь к сеттингу и это видно по его проделанной работе. Если кратко говорить о самой игре, то Кайл смог создать действительно крутое и атмосферное путешествие, позволившее мне прочувствовать два года пиздеца и безнадеги из обычной жизни Гару... Dark Кто бы мог подумать, что игрокнига с упрощeнными механиками настолки сможет выдать такой крутой экспириенс и так сильно затянуть. Мне только обидно, что такой материал оформлен просто в виде интерактивной книги(( За полноценную VN с артом, саундтреком и хорошим интерфейсом я бы с радостью заплатил больше, но, УВЫ... В итоге - добрые 9 из 10.

long game, very interesting read and insight into the werewolves in the world of darkness. would recommend looking up your save location in program files > steam > userdata > > 2402280 this will save you alot of headache if you don't have time for multiple playthroughs and want to explore options without the fear of redoing your 10 hour game save

Salvia trip with werewolves

This is one of the few text adventures that made me slow down and think to the point where I need to put it down and come back to it later. It also introduced me to the concepts of Werewolf: The Apocalypse in a concise, piecemeal fashion, which has let me understand everything much better than reading a wall of text in a book. Highly recommend.

Words Hard, This is probably the better of many $20 purchases I've made. The Story is well done and the atmosphere is executed amazingly. Having Finished it I feel tired. There are no breaks in an eternal struggle I guess. (anyway 7 page novel on how I am so normal about WtA) Bias aside, great game.