A game like Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries was inevitable in a media landscape where a grim-and-gritty reboot is as common as films shot in color and in focus. That doesn't make another example of this trend an inherently bad thing, but the pitfalls of such an approach are numerous, and Woolfe provides a harsh lesson in how to fall into all of them.

The pratfalling starts early as our heroine, an axe-wielding, platinum-haired, Amy Brown-meets-

Red herself speaks in a mix of sub-Buffy the Vampire Slayer modern teenage one-liners and broken, self-loathing pseudo-poetry.

When the game leaves story behind in favor of player interaction, it involves competent platforming and puzzle solving with a small measure of 3D movement and backtracking, but it’s still fairly linear. It's also wholly unremarkable, marred by a score of tiny and annoying but not game-breaking bugs. A puzzle on the second stage requires Red to perform a relatively simple shimmy along a set of pipes to jump across a gap before being drowned in a pile of sludge from above; this stranded me 20 minutes longer than it should have because the game refused to recognize and grasp the pipes on the other side. Long stretches of running from enemies are aggravating because Red snags herself on the edges of walls.

Combat is rather boring to begin with, with a light attack, heavy attack, and two magical attacks. Nothing works more effectively than just spamming heavy attack ad nauseum, especially at the frequent moments when hits don't register, which is especially frustrating in sections involving an evil Pied Piper who summons groups of rats. A ground pound attack, which is supposed to make quick work of the horde, rarely connects in the way you think it will, and the group can chip away at Red's energy far faster than she can readjust and aim for whatever's attacking her. Boss fights compound all these issues, with scripted events all suffering from occasional moments of glitchy failure.

Woolfe barely comes into its own before it's over, with the entire game taking about 2–3 hours tops. It's apparently only half of a two-part experience, but the halfway mark of the game doesn't show much promise for the second. Adult takes on childrens' stories are a hard balancing act, and the moral of this particular take is perhaps in showing just how much a storyteller has to grow up to get it right.