Originally Posted October 19th 2014 on the Seafoam Gaming forums

Title: Red Riding Hood

System: Wii U (eShop)

Price: $0.99

Release date: 10/2/2014

The main game/story

This game is a visual novel. As people may know, I consider the legendary Spike Chunsoft to be my all time favorite game developer. And their main genre was the visual novel. I didn’t expect anything mind-blowing from this game, but I will at least let you all know I do have knowledge with this genre, and that therefore this review is a bit different since this game is all story.

This is a variation on the famous Little Red Riding Hood story. As you know by now, it’s about a little girl who sees her grandmother but either meets a wolf who impersonates her grandmother with a good or bad intention. It’s pretty straightforward and talking anymore about this game would be spoiling the entire game. There’s basically two endings, all from one choice. This makes the game very shallow and quite short, much more than it needs to be.

Graphics

This is a game with a very, VERY simple menu system. All you do is tap the touch screen to continue. It’s clean for the most part and the 2D artwork looks very nice, but sometimes doesn’t quite blend in well with the nature background (Which are real life photos of such places).

Music and sound effects:

Music changes depending on the current situation going on. It all works fine but nothing too memorable. There’s really no sound effects at all except for a few to help fit what’s going on in the story, and they play when they should.

Gameplay

This isn’t a game. I therefore can’t talk about gameplay. It’s a visual novel but it’s very light on content (Only ONE choice and the whole game can be completed from both sides in about 10 minutes or so, depending how long it takes you to read the text), and this really hurts the game. What could have been a nice, quick visual novel that’s perfect for kids is rather shallow and bland at best. I do think this had potential, if it only had more choices and was a little longer. As very short as this game may be, however, it’s still hard to recommend even for the single dollar you’d have to spend in order to get this game.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Brave Rock Games had great intentions for bringing visual novels to the Wii U, but this first attempt just is so short and doesn’t have much options that it doesn’t seem to work as well as it should. I don’t even think kids would like this for long enough after reading it a couple of times.

But I do think that with this feedback in mind, they should still pursue going after other stories to put them on Wii U, like the Ugly Duckling and Jack and the Beanstalk. With more choices and a slightly longer story, I think they could have a great series of visual novels for kids and parents alike. But as this game stands right now, I give Red Riding Hood a 3 out of 10.

Thanks to Brave Rock Games for the review code.