Howl

It's gorgeous. The art style would carry this if it were just a picture book. Absolutely wonderful little depictions of werewolves and villagers and everything is very reactive within its cell to the things around it. Werewolves howl and transform villagers. Villagers hold their breath and quake when werewolves are near. The sprites all fuzz with the squiggles of their own animation. The sound is also nice. Soft harp music, some good voice acting. The writing is scant but compelling. The idea of lycanthropy being spread through the sound of the howls is a really cool twist. But. Let's scratch beneath that. What do we have? Minimalist narrative puzzler. It's very forgiving. You can rewind freely. Enemies move when you do. You can kind of see what stuff is going to happen when you click on a tile. You have pretty generous tools for dealing with the wolves, including a STRONG 1-1 poke that's spammable. If you're new to puzzlers, this is a good introductory one. If you want something to tax your brain right off the bat, I don't think even hard mode is going to help. Hard mode, for what it's worth, just gives you less information. I don't think that's particularly fun or interesting within the context of these kinds of puzzles. But I'm also not someone who really likes puzzles, so your mileage may vary. There's also some oddness to the interface. I allegedly have some special powers, and I've even used one twice, but in every other stage I've done since then they've been deactivated? Is this a bug? If not, why do I never have access to them? There doesn't seem to be anything I can do to equip them, even though the game says I can. Probably I'm an idiot and I've missed something simple, but the danger with minimalism is that you maybe don't explain your game such that an idiot like me can figure it out. Anyway, I think Howl is a nice title, and if that's what you're looking for and you don't mind lots of simple puzzles you'll have a good time. Edit: Yeah, tried one more time to figure out how to equip the powers or whatever I'm supposed to do with them, and I have no idea what in sam hill what I'm doing wrong. 2nd Edit: Powers are only available at X number of tiles moved. This is... funky. And it makes upgrading your AP bar *the* number one priority, to the point of brainlessness, at the start of play. It does add some interesting flow to the game, but again I am an idiot so I feel like it could have been communicated better. 3rd Edit: Rolled credits. There's free dlc that adds about another thirty minutes, but otherwise my playtime is a little on the long side. In order to do much of the dlc, I'd sorta have to grind my powers by replaying old stages, which I don't really wanna do. The dlc def expects you to have your powers maxed, which turns it into more of a straightforward puzzle experience and less of the interesting freeform thing that the rest of the game is. Speaking of which, I kinda wish they'd leaned a little bit more into the rpg elements. With just a touch more progression, I think you'd have a banger micro srpg. As is, still a cool game, and I wish the best to the studio.

what caught my eyes first was the art style of the game! I absolutely adore it. I had so much fun playing it even though I found some levels very hard (looking at you DLC boss)

Fun puzzle game. Doesn't overstay it's welcome or depth, which is nice. The final rot monster in the (optional) town section felt impossible, but I guess I might be missing something. Played through on Steamdeck and although mostly fine it did randomly crash during two different levels.