I found that The Wolf of Derevnya was a visual novel with a good story, characters, twists, that was ruined by a poor UI and saving issues. I had guessed who the monster was early on, just had a gut feeling, but the journey to the end was still enjoyable. I did find there to be several faux choices though, basically no matter what I picked I wound up at the same point. I also wish I had more choice at the end as to what happened. It was bitter sweet and made sense but at the same time I actually sided with the monster and would have liked to see that route explored. The music was very well done as were the sound effects and the art. The game really did a good job of making you feel in the story with the audio and art. The issues I had with the save function was that every time I would click on the save game menu it would take more than thirty seconds for the menu to show up, as well as another wait to actually save the game. This was the same for loading a game. While I waited I could see my system resources sky rocket as the game needed an immense amount of RAM and VRAM to save or load, more than any other visual novel I have ever seen. The VRAM could soar as high as 5GB and the system RAM as high as 9GB. I've seen AAA first person games use less. Now when not saving or loading the game used a normal amount of resources for the genre. This did ruin my experience more than you might think. There is no feature where I could go back in the text at all so if I wanted to try a different path I would have to load the previous save. Another issue was I noticed that the save files in the load screen were no in chronological order always and I had to go searching to find a specific file. 

I played The Wolf of Derevnya on Linux. The game never crashed. You can save at any time and there didn't appear to be any limit to how many save files you can have. 

Game Engine: Unity

Graphics API: OpenGL

Disk Space Used: 769 MB

GPU Usage: 29-59%

VRAM Usage: 1285-5085 MB

CPU Usage: 5-8 %

System RAM Usage: 2.0-9.0 GB

Overall I think the core game was well done despite my wishes for different ending options. The audio, art and story were all great. The story could have used more branching but the amount of choices were decent. Sadly the amount of time it took to save and load a game was terible and really ruined any enjoyment I had. I finished the game in four hours and thirty nine minutes. I paid $7.02 CAD for the game and feel that would have been a good price for the game had it not had the issues it did.

My Score: 5/10

My System: Intel i5-12600K | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM | WD SN850X 2TB | Artix | Kernel 6.12.9 | Mesa 24.3.3

this story was beautiful. i experienced a close family loss a little over two years ago, and it was a sudden loss (we had exactly two weeks notice). this interactive story was so simple, yet managed to near-perfectly explain the range of emotions and how some people come with grief (i.e. trying to replicate the connection you had, isolating yourself from everyone else). the cemetery scene made me cry with how accurate the portrayal of grief was. overall, playing this game was a wonderful experience and has now become one of my go-to games when the grief hurts just a bit too much.

this game hits you in the feels way more than you expect it to at the beginning!

This was really cute!