As a longtime Werewolf: The Apocalypse enthusiast with near debilitating social anxiety, I've always been kind of frustrated with the lack of good video games in the setting. I've always been super nervous about playing tabletop games online with strangers, so licensed Werewolf games have made up the majority of my experience with the setting, and given White Wolf's notoriously spotty record of video game adaptations, there are only a handful of Werewolf games, and fewer still worth playing. All things considered, I am very happy to say that The Book of Hungry Names is one of those precious few.

The Book of Hungry Names is an entirely text-based role-playing game from writer Kyle Marquis of Choice of Games, a company that specializes in a sort of "choose your own adventure" style of interactive novel. Much like other CoG titles, you start off your adventure with a series of choices engineered to build yourself a character from scratch; most of your character's physical characteristics are left to your imagination, focusing instead on establishing a background and basic skillset for you to start engaging with the world. Much like the tabletop game, the actions you take succeed or fail based on dice rolls, with modifiers depending on the stats associate with whatever action you decide to take. As such, gameplay essentially boils down to understanding your character's skillset and playing to their strengths so you can survive long enough to further develop and expand on your skills.

It's a fairly simplistic system, and I understand that a lot of gamers may be put off by the idea of playing what is essentially an interactive novel. That being said, I think anyone open to this kind of experience will be pleasantly surprised by the mechanical depth that comes into play when you factor in the Werewolf ruleset on top of CoG's formula.

I think the most exciting feature here is actually the "convictions" you can develop over the course of the game. It's a little bit like the classic "morality meter" trope, but instead of being one single gauge that tracks how "good" or "evil" you are you get no less than 5 separate gauges tracking your attitudes on various werewolf issues like your relationship with the Garou "Litany" and your willingness to coexist with non-Garou human beings. While you are ultimately free to choose whatever dialogue options you like, regardless of whether it's consistent with decisions you may have made in the past, your convictions become a major factor in your dealings with the spirit world, as spirits react strongly to those with a strong sense of self. As such, it becomes crucial to understand your own convictions in order to deal with them effectively, as particularly strong convictions may earn you Gifts from like-minded spirits, and even determine which tribes you may eventually join. It's a rare morality system that manages to have a meaningful impact on gameplay without restricting your own role-playing potential, but The Book of Hungry Names has done it.

Of course, no matter how mechanically good the game might be, none of it would matter if the story itself weren't worth reading. Fortunately, Marquis has delivered a very engaging campaign which is well worth at least two playthroughs. Marquis uses the established conventions of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and the wider World of Darkness setting to deliver a compelling cosmic mystery which pits you against an entity which excels at deception and subversion, capable of trapping mortal beings in illusions that cater to their own convictions and desires, and even force you at times to act contrary to your own convictions simply to avoid falling into its traps. The final confrontation is nothing short of epic, and a victorious ending feels like a genuine and very satisfying triumph.

If anything, I think the only thing I didn't like about this game is that it has a tendency to drag on at times, especially when the aforementioned spirits start coming into play. You can end up spending a lot of time meandering about the hub town between missions just trying to make contact with spirits to figure out which ones you can actually obtain gifts from and ultimately restore the Broad Brook caern to its former splendour, and I found myself a little aggravated with the repetitiveness of it. Fortunately, The Book of Hungry Names mitigates this by making permadeath an optional feature rather than a core mechanic as appears to be the norm for CoG titles. To be clear, you can generally avoid an early game over with a decent understanding of your own skills, but given the length of this particular game, I think it's worth mentioning that you can run a playthrough or two without permadeath if you're understandably afraid of having to restart 30+ hours into a campaign and on the cusp of the final battle.

In short, The Book of Hungry Names is a fantastic Werewolf game, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is both interested in the setting and open to an entirely text-based game, and especially if you're a fringe Werewolf enthusiast who's been itching for a game to dip your feet into the World of Darkness.

I'm at a bit of a loss for words as I'm typing this introduction. Death Road to Canada is a very special game in that it's not so much hard to describe it as it is hard to do so in a way that doesn't sound like you're having everybody on. To put it bluntly, this game is ludicrous. This is the kind of game where you can create your two best friends, incompetent and utterly ineffectual to start off, carefully guide them on a whacky, cartoonish road trip across the eastern coast of the United States, and eventually teaming up with Octodad (no, seriously) and a border collie named "Gaylord" only for it all to fall apart in seconds as you watch them all get eaten alive by a gaggle of pixel art zombies because you made a bad call during a siege event, all of this topped off with a bizarre mix of exasperation and simple joy, as well as an overwhelming urge to try it all over again immediately. I have spent almost 90 hours in total playing both the PC and mobile versions of this game and I can tell you that this game really is a one of a kind experience. I also think it's safe to say that you're probably not going to find anything quite like it anywhere else on the market.

So let's start with the basic premise: It's the "Zombocalypse" (yikes) and your journey begins in the state of Florida. For whatever reason, the United States' federal and state governments have all effectively collapsed, and so everyone is pretty much left to fend for themselves. Your character starts hearing rumours that the Canadian government is doing just fine, and that the country is for the most part secure and zombie-free. Seeing as you don't have much to look forward to staying in the U.S., you decide to set a course for the Canadian border. Along the way, you will make frequent stops both in trader camps and areas overrun by zombies in looting and siege events. In addition, your adventure will be peppered with a very wide variety of randomized, text-based events that range from hypothetically ordinary in the context of a zombie apocalypse to the kind of antics that would be considered nonsensical even by the standards of an average Saturday morning cartoon. Every event provides opportunities to improve your odds by gathering weapons and supplies, teaching your characters a variety of survival skills, and bringing on new people, if you're so inclined.

It's not as much of a hassle as it might sound. In fact, one of the most charming things about the game is that it takes the tired zombie apocalypse concept and decides to have fun with it rather than simply delivering another bland, uninspired open-world survival game, or otherwise trying a bit too hard to make you cry. The game’s quirky, ironic humour ensures that there is almost never a dull moment. Looting and siege events are littered with a variety of relatively mundane businesses and stores with tongue-in-cheek names like “Yall-Mart,” trader camps are home to a number of unusual characters including a “Wandering Anime Salesman” and a talking dog peddling ammunition of all types, and those are only on the moderate end of game’s bizarre spectrum, and we’ve already established that the text events are silly. Even the brief, seconds long periods of time between these events are peppered with the zany banter of your current party members, and these interactions vary depending on the traits and stats of the characters involved, even going so far as to raise or lower characters’ morale depending on how well they’re getting on with each other. To top it all off, it’s all pseudo-random, and while I feel the phrase “no two playthroughs are ever the same” is overused in game review and critique, the game features such a huge variety of charmingly bizarre events and scenarios that every run feels fresh, and you’re frequently stumbling onto new content. All of this taken together with the total of ten different modes, each tweaking the rules and mechanics of the game’s base campaign, adds up to an impressive amount of replay value.

All that said, this game is certainly not for everyone. For one thing, the sense of humour isn't exactly high-brow, often invoking internet memes and pop-culture references, and it is by no means above the occasional fart joke. If that sounds immature to you, it is. Unapologetically so. I can understand why someone might find this game's brand of comedy tasteless, and if that sounds unappealing to you then you're probably better off doing something else with your time. There's also the matter that this game is somewhat challenging by design. Even on its lowest difficulty campaign modes, you will probably not make it to Canada on your first attempt, and learning things like which locations you should be visiting during looting events and the best solutions to the randomised text events will involve a lot of trial and error. The game has more than enough content to alleviate that frustration, but if you're the sort that finds it hard to appreciate games with permadeath mechanics then you are, again, better off playing some other game.

Fortunately, I have seen very little in the way of mechanical flaws and glitches while playing this game. About the only bug I can even recall during my time playing is one that occasionally crops up during looting events with particularly long but thin urban layouts, the ones featuring only about two or three buildings per street. For whatever reason, these maps in particular occasionally won't properly spawn the building you selected for the event, which can be a major problem considering you usually have a particular item or resource in mind when you select these events. This is mercifully mitigated by the fact that these maps generally feature a number of extra houses and hotels you can search for additional supplies, but it's a problem all the same. Also worth mentioning is the fact that every major update seems to also reset your local stats, which has a side effect of locking upgrades and character traits and perks you had previously unlocked, as well as resetting your progress on certain Steam achievements tracking things like how many zombies you've killed, or how many times you've trained a particular stat. I'm not sure why exactly this happens, but I also have to point out that it didn't happen during the last update around Valentine's Day, and so it may no longer be relevant. Still, it's worth bearing in mind, as losing that progress can be rather irritating.

Overall, though, I'd say this game is an absolute joy to play, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, light-hearted take on the whole "zombie apocalypse" trope.