ARTE

I wasn´t expecting such a good Metrovania and Yuri game. And then the characters are so comical and charming. 

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

An incredibly well-written and charming visual novel starring a non-binary dragon-ish Kaiju detective. Kaiju Noir hits every note a reader loves about old detective noir stories, but spun in a manner that is both very non-human, but also contemporary. There's strong messaging about leftist stances like anti-authoritarianism and pro-queer rights. This novel adeptly straddles the line of poking fun at detective noir tropes and conventions, but does so in a manner that is loving and lets the reader know that the author loves those movies as much as the reader does. 

The music is good and fits the themes, and the artwork is fantastic. The characterization is incredibly strong, with all of the kaiju having distinct and memorable personalities and designs. By the end of the novel, I was thoroughly enamored by the entire cast, with a special appreciation for Alix.

Overall, this was an excellent way to spend two hours. The world it crafts feels familiar yet very fantastic, and there's an immense amount of love enbykaiju has for both the genre, kaiju in general, and social justice. Definitely worth a play, and I'd LOVE to play a sequel.