You like Wolfhound, but Wolfhound does not like you. I’m going to write about 1,180 more words about Wolfhound, and most of them are going to orbit around this intrinsic truth. You like Wolfhound because it is fun, colorful, inventive, and well-designed… and Wolfhound hates you for no known reason.
It does really hate you though. It hates you and it wants to kill you. It wants you to suffer before you die. It wants to burn down your house and make you watch and salt the soil where your house once stood so nothing will ever grow there. Wolfhound looks you in the eye and then puts out a cigarette on your bare arm. It’s also a lot of fun.
Wolfhound is an overt pastiche of NES-era design elements crafted together into one remarkably coherent amalgam. The plot is paper-thin: Bermuda Triangle, jungle island, Third Reich, secret mission, one-man army. The less said about it, the better. We’re not here for the story beats. We’re here to wreck fascism with guns and lots of jumping. You know… video games circa 1989.
Studying the Classics
The 8-bit inspirations begin with the cosmetic: visual references from the Ikari Warriors plane crash cinematic to monster-filled Contra jungles to Bionic Commando dialogue boxes. But the references aren’t merely visual trappings. Castlevania 2-inspired spiders drop from trees and throw webs at you. Ghosts n’ Goblins zombies rise from graveyards and hurl themselves mindlessly at you. Metroid Zoomers crawl across the narrow platforms, threatening you.
These NES inspirations extend into the design philosophy. This is a vicious, often unfriendly metroidvania, where save points are spaced out enough that death feels like a real penalty, where tall rooms demand climbing through hordes of monsters and landing a dozen precision jumps, and where a single mistake forces you to restart the ascent Getting Over It-style. The cruel humans behind Wolfhound even had the audacity to include fall damage, which is just plain mean in a platformer. Like I said, Wolfhound hates you.
It’s not Dark Souls hard, it’s old-school-Nintendo hard. You’ll spend less time dying to individual tough enemies than you would in a soulslike, and the bosses aren’t quite as difficult as the ones you’d face in Sekiro or Bloodborne. But the price of traversing the ordinary world is draining. Spikes, falls, landmines, and aggressive foes are everywhere, and they nickel-and-dime you to death before you know it.
And yet, it’s fun. Lots of fun. Loads of fun. Because despite its occasional cruelty, Wolfhound is very thoughtfully made. To paraphrase Heinlein, it is made as difficult as possible, and on purpose. This is a mindfully-designed game.
The Devil’s in the Details
Every tile placement is obviously meticulously considered. Climbing and jumping mechanics are pixel-perfect, making most traversal a delight. The map wraps around itself in interesting, sometimes devious ways, forcing you through high-friction areas and rewarding you for curiosity with a bevy of hidden power-ups and weapon upgrades.
The weapon system allows switching between a base pistol with unlimited ammunition and specialty weapons with a limited number of rounds (a la Metroid missiles). Though you never run out of clips for the pistol, you do have to reload your handgun after every few shots, and you quickly get into a satisfying rhythm of spraying lead and then jamming the reload button while evading counterattacks. Heavier weapons also require manual reloading, but have finite ammo that must be replenished by killing enemies and gathering drops This works pretty well, though the ammo gathering on the bolt-action rifle is kind of weird and unintuitive… you won’t always pick up a clip even when you need bullets unless you’ve first topped off the magazine. It’s a tiny bit of needless complexity that’s a bit annoying.
There are some other snags. The vine swinging mechanics are, plainly put, awful in the preview build I played. Catching a vine requires pressing up on the d-pad in midair, which can throw off a controlled jump and cause you to miss a vine or, worse, land too high up on it to effectively initiate a swing off. Since you can’t climb up and down vines once you are on them, landing too high effectively forces you to drop to the bottom of a gauntlet and start all over again… extremely annoying as vines are pretty common. I hope they fix this.
Under Construction
The Wolfhound demo makes it very clear that the game is still in development and that bugs exist, and I did encounter a major one. Landing a final blow in a boss fight while simultaneously losing my final life point triggered the post-battle cutscene, but when it ended, my body simply lay immobile in the boss room, forcing me to manually kill the game process, restart, and fight the battle again. Hardly a huge gripe, and I’m sure they’ll fix it.
Speaking of boss battles, they’re very inured to the 8-bit era… big pattern-based setpieces in rectangular rooms. Most require a degree of pattern memorization to successfully complete, which means you’ll likely be taking a few passes at a big bad before defeating them. Fortunately, Wolfhound thoughtfully places save and recharge points in close proximity to boss rooms.
I’d be doing the development team a disservice if I didn’t mention just how freakin’ impressive the art direction is. Wolfhound may be designed to play like an NES game, but it sure doesn’t look like one. Its color depth is astounding, with distinctive color palettes for each zone and an incredible variety of uniquely colored tiles within each area. It’s an aesthetic that’s alien to both the eight and 16-bit eras, a richer tapestry informed by modern pixel art development where blocky bitmaps are an artistic choice rather than a necessity. It’s a rich and vibrant world worth exploring. The enemies are even more impressive than the environments.
Power-ups, meanwhile, are pretty standard metroidvania fare, with new mobility options opening up new areas and new weapons giving you an edge as foes get tougher. Your weapons are also upgradable using resource packs. These tend to hide in out-of-the-way places, and hunting them down is among the most rewarding aspects of Wolfhound, as gun upgrades really do make a huge difference increasing damage, fire rate, ammo capacity, etc.
Wolfhound is shaping up to be a solid exploratory platformer that absolutely deserves your attention. If you enjoy exploring dangerous places and are willing to accept that the journey will be fraught with peril and frequent failure, you’re likely going to have a great time in the forests and caverns of the foreboding Bermuda Triangle island, shooting Nazis and mutants and generally having a blast saving the world from the forces of evil.
Jared Petty does all kinds of things with video games. When he’s not writing for IGN, he’s making games with Other Ocean Interactive creating new episodes of The Top 100 Games Podcast. Find him on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky as @pettycommajared. He lives in Canada now and likes to tell people about it like someone who’s just discovered intermittent fasting.
