Wolf with Inn

For £17 this is umm.....

No creative expression in a cozy resource game. Cannot design the inn or move things around. Well actually you click to remove 4 cobwebs. The inn is just a place you do a task to earn money for the skill tree.

Wolf form has like no reason other than plot. Unfortunately you get access to the skill tree early of which leaves lots to be desired, ie the wolf concept doesnt get much better. Why is the skill tree literally including "you can now make beer", and a whopping upgrade of "you can make berry beer". What is this skill, and why is it learnt at a WEREWOLF SHRINE. Skill tree is not developing yourself or speed (compare to skill books in stardew...) its instead, you can now collect another resource on the floor (YEY!). And this is for every skill, its just a new set of recipes... so why is being a werewolf relevant?

Weird stamina management? You'll spend the whole game picking up ingredients from the floor and just walking around, so why is there a stamina bar when out and about? Its not a skill expression, its just stalling gameplay. And the movement is SLOW!

Map is small! One of the first quests is to find the village/ town / something and i genuinely didn't believe i found because it was 3 shops... on a bridge. Not in the town or village, shops on a bridge.
Trailer says explore biomes, and a biome they show is a werewolf statue that is like 3 seconds above from your inn. No reassuance that these extra locked off biomes arent just a "do minigames to pick up item" .

No fast storage slot option, so if you pick up lots of things like the game intends... you have to manually move every item into the storage box if you want to store them. There are 30 slots,so have fun punishing yourself if you decide to go for a small resource run.

Looping gameplay music is cruel. After 20 minutes of the same 2 minute audio... No change in music and the same looping audio will literally drive me to insanity.

Inn gameplay is... pick up food (you dont cook it), take it table, wait for next food to pick up and take to customer. Theres a minigame for making beer, but this is as far as i got.

On discount, sure try it, maybe youll vibe with it. But i did not.

Yet another werewolf game that fails to understand why people want a game where you play as a werewolf.

Gameplay: 3/10
It's functional. Kind of. Gameplay consists of gathering ingredients for when you open the inn. It seems simple enough, but it boils down to 'wander around the map and gather ingredients'. Every action has a minigame attached to it. Chopping wood? Align a ring with another ring and hit the action key. Harvesting honey? Perform a memory mini game. Gathering eggs? Play Frogger At Home. The idea behind having things to do while you gather things is *fine*, I guess, but when everything becomes a federal issue to solve, it quickly grows tedious. Jarringly, at the beginning of the game, you clear some cobwebs. This doesn't require a minigame, and it never comes up again.
Between that and the complete lack of customization to the interior or exterior of the inn, you're just kind of stuck with what's in front of you.
Not to mention I'm on day 4 and I haven't actually gotten to play as the wolf. The only time the wolf's come out to play was at the very beginning to smash up some furniture, after which there's an upgrade in a skill tree for using it to get rid of angry customers (I never actually got to see this) and he just kind of exists as a voice in your head.
The tavern management side of things is brainless. Food is cooked automatically, you deliver dishes to tables. Rinse and repeat. You can pour drinks, but the mechanism to actually do this is non-intuitive, and I'm sure to access the tutorial you need to unlock actual brewing. Funny how the first drink you unlock, mint tea, does not proc the tutorial.
The skill tree is accessed through a werewolf shrine. It looks like a werewolf. You need to use the shrine to learn how to make beer. You gather items to give to the shrine, you also need to earn money. What a concept.
I also sold some wood to a trader. They're just Kind Of There. The UI was bugged.

Sound Design: 2/10
The sound effects aren't poorly chosen, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ are they repetitive. Spoken dialogue is gibberish and sounds, there's one song in the game on repeat, and the other sound effects are just kind of there. It's aggressively mediocre and detracts from the overall quality of the game.

Art Design: 6/10
Arguably good, and what drew my attention to the game in the first place, but there's a shocking *lack* of actual animations to the game. There's a cutscene with a fairly landlord that cuts to black briefly because she doesn't have an animation for leaving. The aforementioned cobwebs just kind of pop out of existence when you clean them. It gives the game this 'function over form' quality to it that screams, yes, this is a video game, but the developer couldn't really be assed to make it look *good*. It's pretty, sure, but it lacks depth.
Edit to add: According to the post on r/werewolves where I first found this game, the art assets are AI generated. This doesn't impact my score for it, but I felt it was important to add to my review.

Story: 3/10
Generic 'you now run a tavern' storyline. You find yourself at an inn, you start working at the inn, you have rent to pay because it's overdue. It's the most bottom of the barrel plot which would otherwise be fine if the characters were actually *interesting* to read. There's a werebear in the forest, he's a father who can't see his kid. His kid is kind of an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for no reason, this is blamed on teenage ennui. Your boss is a demon named Fausto, he's alright but there's not much going for him. The Fairy Landlord is just kind of there.

Overall: 2/10
I actually had to check while writing this review if this game was in Early Access and I'd somehow missed that. No, this isn't early access. This is the full, and apparently intended release. It released without a demo, so I had to buy the game to see how it plays, and I came in with relatively high hopes that unfortunately were let down severely. This game would have to be rebuilt from the ground up with farming mechanics, better interaction mechanics (no more minigames for basic interactions, please), animations for interactions that aren't a minigame, the ability to actually customize the layout of the inn and immediate surroundings, either proper voice acting or no voice grunting, and for the love of all that is holy, please allow me to toggle between human and wolf form at will. Or at least make that something I level up or something. Lean into the werewolf bit more. Maybe we chop trees with our claws, maybe we dig up herbs like a wolf would, hell, maybe hunting to gather meat.

As this game is, it has a really great concept, but terrible execution.

Extremely Buggy

Day 4 - Unable to start tavern and there are multiple instances of music doing so

Zero QOL
The main character walks really slowly, even with sprint (Pressing Shift) and there are ALWAYS minigames for every single collection action