The “Classic Fairy Tale, just darker” thing is perilously close to a cliche, these days.  ABC has gotten four seasons of Once Upon a Time out of it, with a fifth on the way, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve watched the first three seasons and am waiting for the fourth to show up on Netflix.

One of the more fun characters in OUaT is Red Riding Hood, who is, well, a werewolf so basically Red Riding Hood AND the Big Bad Wolf in one.  She TRIES not to eat anyone during the full moon, but sometimes…

The Red Riding Hood in Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries is NOT a werewolf.  She’s just a slightly deranged young woman with an axe, out to avenge the murder of her father.  And her mother.  And probably a lot of other people.  There’s a lot of avenging that needs doing in her world, and she’s just the borderline psychopath for the job.

Seriously, she has the crazy eyes.

She also tries to rhyme everything she says, though it’s not obvious from the subtitles in that screen shot, which I think is further evidence that she is a few fries short of a happy meal.

On your way to kill the villain, I am not making this next bit up,  “B.B.Woolfe”, you do a lot of platforming, fight a couple of mini bosses, solve a few simple puzzles, and generally strike a blow for heroines everywhere.

Well, lots of blows.  With an axe.  As mentioned.

But the scenery DOES look really good…

…even if the bloom is turned up a little high sometimes:

Woolfe was a very short game.  It took about two and a half hours on the “Normal” difficulty setting, and it’s obvious that the people behind it are really hoping to get a sequel out of it because it straight-up ends with To Be Continued.

It’s also really fond of killing the player.  It took a lot of trial and error to get through some of the platforming bits, and there was one spot where I had to pause the game and alt-tab over to a video play-through just because I’d died a good half-dozen times trying to make a jump and I needed to know whether is was a skill thing or whether I was just doing something catastrophically wrong.

It was the catastrophically wrong thing, just in case you were curious.

To counter any thought that I might be complaining about the difficulty, I will say that I never got frustrated even though I was getting murdered over and over again.  The game is super well-checkpointed, so a death just means that you’ve been kicked back about 30 seconds and can instantly try again.  The boss fights all have little introductory cinematics, which would normally be a recipe for aggravation, but you can skip them quickly and get right back to trying to figure out what you need to do to win.

I’m going to give it a solid recommendation despite its length.  I have played a ton of games that were $60 for 8 hours, so $10 for 2.5 hours seems pretty decent value for money.