Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf

Genre: Turn-Based RPG / Interactive Story-Driven Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf is a Turn-Based RPG with a heavy emphasis on its interactive story. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this game is half-RPG, half “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style narrative, with anywhere from half to two-thirds of the game told from within the pages of a book in the game that you are “writing” through your choices.

It’s a really unique approach to the genre that works well for the game, and this is largely because the story is extraordinarily well-written, regardless of which path you have your character choose to take. The game proudly wears late author Joe Dever’s name in the title, and his influence shows here, weaving a dark tale about an empire falling to monstrous creatures, and a lone noble warrior stalking into enemy territory to head off another inevitable attack on humanity.

The gameplay of the RPG half fares… a little less well. There’s no traditional movement in the game – all of that is handled through the Choose Your Own Adventure stuff. Rather, you have menus outside of battle, and then you have RPG battles, which are typical RPG affairs, except you have a limited time to input actions, and many actions require a Quick Time Event-style input for the full effect.

That’s frustrating in itself, especially for those looking to sit back and enjoy a nice story-driven adventure at their own pace. But what really hurts this game is its control and menu interface, which is confusing and difficult to navigate. I took an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out how to simply equip a potion to my inventory, accidentally using one because the menu icons don’t really tell you what they do, and ultimately realizing that I needed to press and hold a button to grab it, where in most other RPGs it would be a simple matter of selecting it and then selecting its destination.

The game’s visuals are pretty good, with the story parts told through the weathered pages of a book in sepia tones, and the RPG battles through a decent 3D graphics engine that looks pretty good on the Switch. Nothing truly incredible, but certainly well above average for an independent developer.

In the end, it’s a shame the RPG half of Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf is so lacking, because the interactive adventure half really is compelling, to the point where I found myself wishing I could just play through the story without the bother of navigating the game’s terrible menus and frustrating RPG battles. However, if you’re patient enough to put up with that stuff, I think you’ll find the story to be plenty enough reason to give this game a shot.

tl;dr – Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf is a Turn-Based RPG with a strong Interactive Narrative component. The “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style story here is absolutely superb, which makes it really frustrating that the RPG elements in the game are so lacking and the control interface is so terrible. If you can put up with the game’s flaws though, you’ll find the story to be compelling enough to keep you playing through it.

Grade: C+

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