When I think of puzzle-strategy games, I think of a very dry experience that is void of narrative value. That might seem like a knock against those types of games, but they are what they are, and that isn’t a bad thing because most games make for an intellectually fun time. I like feeling smart and feeling accomplished, and those games help me from time to time.
Now, HOWL from developer Mi’pu’mi Games GmbH breaks that dry experience mode thanks to its inclusion of a narrative. You play as a werewolf hunter and your mission is to save as many people as possible from becoming a werewolf, while also ridding the land of werewolves, especially their leaders. The game’s narrative is supported by a dreary backdrop and hand-drawn art that gives you this haunting atmosphere of hopelessness. Below that narrative layer lies a simple, yet complicated puzzle-strategy game that rewards more than it punishes while maintaining a motivating and sometimes overbearing feeling of challenge constantly pushed with every new turn.
It’s fascinating how HOWL can easily hook you without knowing it and it’s all because the above is well-executed.
So, lock yourself in for the night, and don’t look too hard at the full moon. Let’s get this review started.
Howling good time
It’s late. It’s the best pun I could come up with. Cut me some slack.
Anyway, HOWL has such a simple design on the surface, where the narrative forms the world you’re about to dive into and gives you a reason for completing puzzles with the best possible strategy. Hunting down werewolves before more are formed while saving villagers is enough to keep a gamer motivated. As I stated before, it’s a narrative backdrop that hides the perceived simplicity of the puzzle underneath.
The puzzle-strategy game underneath is something to behold. The game presents you with a flat 2D, hand-drawn series of blocks featuring painted objects, such as weeping villagers who need help, villages, crops, and creepy forests. You’re tasked with navigating the blocks in the quickest way possible while also trying to take down werewolves and save those who need saving.
About those pesky werewolves, there are a variety of wolves to hunt. Each werewolf comes with a defined range of motion, meaning that some only hop around one block at a time, as the game is turn-based, while others can traverse larger spaces in one single move. Some also have a single-hit requirement to take them down, while others have multi-hit requirements. The mix-match of werewolves and how you approach them makes the strategy as thick as condensed tomato soup without water. I think the enemies were methodically and beautifully created. How they are placed in areas and what that means to the overall strategy of the game truly makes for a well-thought-through experience.
Now, let’s talk about how you traverse the land of HOWL. Your character moves around the board in a freeform fashion. Your main goal is to get out of the situation alive and to do that you want to make it to the black flag lying somewhere on the board. If you make it to this flag, then you complete the level, and you can hypothetically move on to the next. It’s an easy goal to achieve if you don’t want to tussle with the enemies in the game. The problem with this strategy is that to unlock additional levels, you must use enemy skulls. Brutal, but cool. Now, that isn’t to say that you can’t collect X number of skulls from downed werewolves and skip a few other levels to see what is out there. You can do that, but you can’t just always skip levels by going straight for the flag. That would be boring, and no one wants that. The fact that it is out there and available makes for additional layers of strategy in the overall game. You could mix and match how you approach new levels and decide if you can sacrifice difficult moments for progression. You have to put some real thought into it, as the developers certainly look like they did.
Should you choose to stay and fight, and you should because you also want to practice saving villagers, then you have more than a few things to think about. The first is you’re given a goal of restricted movements and action. This goal doesn’t hinder the player, which is good, rather it’s more about posterity in a ‘get the high score’ kind of prestige. At the very least, it will give you a reason to return to do better at achieving goals and probably unlocking trophies along the way.
The game also additionally gives you skull and savior goals. The more you take out werewolves, the better the skull goal gets. Much like in Super Mario 3D World, where you collect stars to unlock more levels, you use werewolf skulls to unlock new levels. Eventually, you will have to concentrate on taking down the wolves, so this isn’t a goal you can discount like the movement goal. But it also isn’t a goal that you have to be perfect at, much like in Super Mario. I like the loosey-goosey nature of the skull collection, but also enjoy how the game silently makes this a priority when considering how the gamer wants to approach each level and progress. Much like movement goals, the skull goal will be an additional motivator to replay the experience.
As for the saving the villager goal part of the experience, that might be the toughest component in strategizing how to approach each level. Villagers are helpless for the most part and are also vulnerable to being turned into a werewolf if left un-rescued for a period of time. The levels I played gave me about two turns to figure out how I was going to rescue a single villager, which generally was a stressful puzzle to solve. If I didn’t figure it out in time, they turned into an additional enemy and I failed to rescue them, which meant I didn’t meet my villager goal. The inclusion of this additional piece on top of werewolves and on top of movement goals showed how much personality and difficulty this perceived simple structure was built from. It’s far more than expected and the varying degree of difficulty was pushed further when multiple villagers came into the picture. It truly becomes a real brain teaser once multiple lives are at stake.
It’s all in the cards
Besides the goals, you also get cards and card upgrades to your strategy of attack approach and movement. The game provides you with cards you can use during gameplay. These cards can be attack or defense, or both. The typical attack card will be arrows, which the user can use a finite number of times during a level. Common arrows can cause one point of damage, while special upgradeable versions can do more, or provide a unique range of attacks.
The defensive cards are the best of both worlds. You can push enemies back, which confuses them and provides you with an extra move to get out of the way. These cards can also be used for pushing enemies into each other or into the defined borders around the level. If you use the cards in this way, you can cause nearly instant death to enemies (depending on the point value of the enemy). This type of card is infinite, so it’s useful to lay this down more times than the arrows. Loud advice – never waste arrows.
Other special move cards can be purchased with goods gathered from goals and progression. Those special cards can be played at certain points during player movement and not just willy-nilly. The special cards can range from more damaging pushes, exploding arrows, or a jump card which allows you to hop over obstacles on the level. There are plenty of obstacles, so you can use those in your strategizing with the cards. All these equal more strategies to add to an already thick layer of strategy from goals and whatnot. The cards certainly help to make the gameplay more interesting and engaging.
Difficulty that isn’t difficult to handle
The difficulty in this game, while certainly heavy at times depending on the level and what is asked of you, was never really infuriating. The game gives you some easy outs with the ability to undo a round if something doesn’t quite work, though this option is finite. If you should lose, the game gets you right back into the action for a redo. You truly don’t have enough time to process any anger or feel like the game is treating you unfairly, which makes for a quick and fun experience over and over again.
Is there any downfall to this gaming experience? I think the game can struggle with substance at times, as some of the levels can be quick run-throughs with only movement goals keeping you engaged. In the first chapter, I found a period of 2-3 later levels that just flew by with movement goals as the only struggle, and I didn’t worry too much about that struggle. More times than not, you get some thought-provoking turn-based puzzle strategy gameplay that is meaningful, so this isn’t a huge issue, but the substance issue does happen in spurts.
On that note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
HOWL from developer Mi’pu’mi Games GmbH is a narrative-driven puzzle-strategy game that brings a simple concept but a complicated gameplay design. The inclusion of a deep goal system that plays into how a player can progress in the game makes for a fun experience, while the offensive and defensive nature of its card system pleasantly complicates and compliments the gameplay. While not everything is perfect, it’s still better than expected.
