Bawling my eyes out about the he/she/they shawties you don't get to bang after the hundred plus loops 😭

If we're being real though this one of the most expertly crafted and designed experiences I've seen out of the indie scene for a minute. Every step of the way you learn about a system of rules and characters, which in turn you are given the tools to perturb the system to move in your favor. At first it plays the hidden role gameplay straight so you can learn the roles and understand the AI. Over time though you learn how to predict the AI, and can move things in your favor easier and easier. The more you play the more you learn but it never gets repetitive because the whole system of AI is carefully balanced to create incredible variety loop to loop.

The challenges are simple until you hit about the mid game, where the goal is often not to win the individual rounds of Werewolf but to instead focus on smaller more unique objectives. Ensuring certain characters survive or trying to eliminate particular targets early, things that exist outside the typical win state/fail state mentality built up in the beginning. One of my favorites is when playing as the killer, you have to make sure the only people who survive are you and a specific crew mate. In order to do so you must eliminate everyone else, teammates included. All these challenges are met with small underlying changes that never make it unfair to get your desired outcome, yet can pull the most out of your understanding of the group and their behaviors.

In many ways a peak science game where using the scientific method will lead you to the fullest understanding of the game and allowing you to perform at ease. Legit I could probably write a grad paper on how this game uses cognitive behavioral theory so competently but they ain't paying me to do that.

On the other hand, the unfortunate part in all this is the narrative is little more than self agrandizing fluff. There's nothing here that uses the sci-fi setting well. You spend lots of time learning about characters but only as a service for useless trivia that only occasionally feeds back into the gameplay. Most of the story plays around different scenes where the extremely anti-social protagonist gets flirted with by people of all genders then treats these same people as nothing more than pieces in the game to win. The repeating patterns give such a dissociative feel to the narrative the scenes meant to evoke an emotional response feel empty. They definitely could've done something with this but in the end it focuses on romantic tragedies and pointless, unanswered questions. C'est la vie I guess.

Overall though the game is hella magnificent. From top to bottom cleanly designed with only a rare few rough patches. Plus you can live out your pansexual fantasy, and what other game gives you that?

Reviewed on Jul 08, 2022


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