Clearly aimed at children, Brave Rock Games' Red Riding Hood is a vaguely interactive storybook that, while certainly not a scam at the inexpensive asking price of $1 USD, will take users no more than 15 minutes to play through. With bare-bones presentation, narration that moves at a snail's pace and nearly no player interaction, parents are advised to find more professional children's eBooks on their tablets and smart devices.
In Red Riding Hood, players listen to a slightly muffled narrator tell the familiar story of Little Red Hiding Hood and her journey to her grandmother's house. There are no twists or turns to make the story more interesting, and the characters are all extremely forgettable. There's nothing wrong with children's games that use familiar fairy tales and fables; the old Sierra On-Line graphic adventures told familiar stories but added gameplay elements like puzzles and injected unique personalities into the characters. But Red Riding Hood has none of that. Aside from deciding on which path to take once in a while, the player does nothing but tap the GamePad screen to move to the next screen. Visual novels need to have some kind of unique interactive element or hook; Red Riding Hood doesn't.
The lack of personality and gameplay might be excusable if the game looked or sounded great, but unfortunately Red Riding Hood is as generic as it is boring. Large cartoon characters appear over still photographs, with no animation or variety. All the characters look like clip-art creations, the music is extremely bland, and the narrator - who narrates the voice of every single character - is a little too quiet and occasionally muffled. The few sound effects that appear are completely unnecessary and do nothing to immerse the player. The text on the screen is small, so parents will unfortunately want to turn up the volume to hear the narrator, and one might expect some kind of educational element, this being a children's game, but there's no learning to be found here other than the built-in cautionary tale of talking to strangers.
Conclusion
There's really not much to say about Red Riding Hood, other than that there are many better options for parents out there to keep their kids entertained. With a length shorter than a children's television show and production values that would be found in a free browser game, it's impossible to recommend Red Riding Hood.
Comments 27
Wow what a surprise the eShop has another new title to add to its shovel ware range.
I knew this was crap the minute i saw it.
Waste of a development kit that probably cost a lot of money.
The... The trailer... at 0:24... I just, no, I can't. Were they seriously so lazy they didn't at least take an iPhone to some random forest and snap a few pics?!?! If they used a picture that comes packaged with every copy of Windows, I'll bet you anything the rest of the pics were just found on Google images.
It has to be better than Tales to Enjoy! Little Red Riding Hood.
Also, @ 0:47 in the trailer, looks as if Mario and Luigi broke bad and went all The Shining on us!
Huh god, Wii u indies were on an absolute roll until The letter came out. They've been able to fill in the gaps with Shovel Knight, Guacamelee! Armillo, and Telsagrad but stuff like this is just atrocious.
Would it have killed them to make some backgrounds? At least that would have given it some art direction. They just look like stock photos with cartoons on top, and because of that, it looks so blatantly lazy.
Another dev that thinks that only because their game is dirt cheap, it is allowed to be lazy and bad.
.... crazy.
It's like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.
And yet this still got a better score than the Letter?
this look bad by the time i watch a video of it on youtube
Nintendo is the new Appstore, they need to go back to beeing abit more stricter with the quality of games we get.
I got in contact with the developers.
Apparently they had no budget what so ever.
Well, their cause was noble at least...
Though if they want to see how the community would respond to a Visual Novel, they should of made a better one .
TOO MUCH GARBAGE ON THE ESHOP!!!! The Wii U eshop should be more like the 3ds eshop.
GOTY 2014!!! XD
Yeah, there's way too much trash on the eShop. It clutters up the place and makes it harder to find the few gems when casually browsing.
Are those screenshots taken from the actual game? Because those are definitely 4:3 images stretched to fit a 16:9 display.
If that's the case, they couldn't even get the aspect ratio right. Despicable.
@ZeroZX_Dev I dunno if the cause is so noble... Every parent should read to their children. It's a huge part of not only the child's development, but the bonding between parent and child. I refuse to believe that there are parents who don't have 10 minutes to read to their kids every day, unless they have quintuplets or something. Some people are just too lazy and expect TV to raise their kids for them.
Let's hope they'll add zombies, werewolves and vampires, multiple ends, an RPG-kind-of level/class system, a lush full 3D open world environment and an epic orchestral soundtrack in the next update....pffffft sorry guys, couldn't resist.
I read the first paragraph and thought that was it. Didn't need to say more than that, guys.
@andrea987 That would be one hell of an update! ... Not as good as dem stability patches, though
though seriously is it really surprising this game is bad
Burn it.
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but this review has breached the review embargo date of October 16 that was set by the developer. Anyways I think the game is more deserving of a 3/10-3.5/10, but I mostly agree with the review itself.
How did it even get a 2/10. It's a flat ZERO. And if you can't then for crap sake it's a 1/10
@Neko_Rukiafan It's true, the embargo date was broke for this. NL shouldn't have accepted the review copy.
At least they priced it appropriately.
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