Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest

Overall a pretty good visual novel. The writing unfortunately seems to alternate between being legitimately good, descriptive, mystical writing on one hand, and an aspiring YA author's edgy power fantasy on the other, but it's easy enough to overlook these moments as the overall quality of the writing was still good enough to keep me engaged and interested until the end. The visuals were similar to the writing, in that sometimes they really nail the surreal, creepy, dreamlike aesthetic they seem to be going for, and other times somebody has photoshopped a wolf's head on the Gigachad guy and called it a day. Not much to say about the sound and music, although the ending song was pretty good.

then it became a mishmash of vibes stranger than the actual lore of werewolves. The only game I've ever refunded.

Wasn't going in with expectations. What's here is true to source material and fairly interesting. Ambient music and stellar artworks. Like one of the old books only electronic.

This game is very story and atmosphere heavy, with stunning audiovisual presentation. While the ending might seem a bit rushed with the universe lore being dumped at you in several consecutive screens, even for people who do not follow/care about the Werewolf:The Apocalypse lore, the game gives enough organic clues to understand and enjoy what is going on. TLDR: Highly enjoyable, can recommend

This game ensnared my interest quickly with vivid descriptions of trees being mangled like human bodies, blurring lines of morality and providing a fascinating (and grisly) exploration of your player character's relationship to nature. Unfortunately, this was all undermined in the second half of the game. Like many 'traditional' tabletop RPGs, this game reads 'player choice' as 'ask players to make uninformed decisions with anti-climatic punishments'. Without going into too many spoilers, I often found myself perplexed by how mundane responses to questions led to particular outcomes (Why am I siding with this person? Who is this new character and why should I care that we're friendly?). This culminated in a late-game stat reset where my highly spiritual character who could actively talk and shape nature suddenly lost the ability to distinguish between regular animals and magical spirits. Effectively, I wasted the bulk of my limited resources choosing between questions like "Do you want to chase this creature? [-1 heart] Do you want to KEEP chasing this creature? [-1 Willpower] Do you REALLY want to keep chasing this creature!? [-1 heart]" etc. Suddenly all of the narrative build up fizzled out because of a needless stat reset and frankly terrible writing/choice design. Like playing a game with a bad Dungeon Master, I was treated to pity and judgement from NPCs I hardly knew and entered the finale with no resources. That meant the narrative climax of my shaman / werewolf journey was my character weakly hiding in the background while the grown-ups made all the big decisions around her. Consequence and failure can be fascinating in a good story but frustrating and dull in a bad one. Unfortunately, this is the latter.