Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names

Introduction

The Book of Hungry Names puts the reader inside a shattered werewolf pack fighting to protect the living earth from a Wyrm Spirit that takes the shape of a comforting lie, told entirely through Choice of Games' text-and-branching-choice format within White Wolf's World of Darkness. Kyle Marquis wrote it, and Choice of Games published it on 25 April 2024. Reading the full available negative sample of 17 English-language reviews alongside the top 100 positives, out of a Very Positive corpus (roughly 91.6% across 202 reviews), finds a genre entry that a striking number of its own longtime readers rank as the strongest Choice of Games has produced in this setting, alongside real, specific problems that show up on both sides of the recommendation split.

Writing that earns its comparisons

The clearest point of agreement in this review's sample is that the prose itself is genuinely strong. Multiple detailed positive reviews, including from readers who describe themselves as longtime Choice of Games fans, independently call it the best entry yet in the studio's World of Darkness line, ranking it above the well-regarded Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road by the same author. Comparisons to Disco Elysium appear more than once, specifically praising the game's ability to move between dark humour, horror and emotionally serious character writing within the same narrative thread. Even several reviewers who ultimately criticise other aspects of the game go out of their way to credit the writing quality on its own terms — one detailed critical review opened by crediting Kyle Marquis's prior work (Nightroad, Silverworld) before explaining specifically where this entry lost them.

A save system this genre badly needed

The most consistent, cross-cutting complaint in this review's sample — appearing in both negative and positive reviews alike — concerns something genuinely basic: The Book of Hungry Names has no proper in-game save or rewind function. One reviewer who otherwise recommends the game strongly put it bluntly: "there has NEVER been a Choice Of Game that has ever needed a save function as badly as this game," and multiple other reviewers describe a convoluted manual workaround involving navigating to local game files directly. This isn't a minor quality-of-life gripe for a game this long — one detailed review, over 15 hours into a playthrough, reported that a content update wiped their unsaved progress entirely, a concrete, specific consequence of the missing feature rather than a hypothetical inconvenience.

A related, verifiable complaint concerns monetisation: two playable tribes are locked behind paid DLC, and one of those DLC packs — "Wardens and Furies" — released the very same day as the base game itself. Multiple reviewers specifically object to this "zero-day DLC" structure for a single-player story game, one writing plainly: "Quit nickel and diming your players and just price your games up front!"

A tonal choice its own readers disagree about

The most genuinely contested element in this review's sample concerns how the game handles real-world political themes within its werewolf mythology. A meaningful cluster of negative reviews describe the treatment as heavy-handed, with specific complaints that the Fenris cult — one of the story's primary antagonist factions for a large portion of the game — is written as bumbling and ineffectual rather than genuinely threatening, undercutting tension the reviewers felt the story needed. Other reviewers explicitly reject that framing: one wrote directly that they don't consider "anything remotely 'woke' automatically bad" and still found real moral nuance in how the game handles its real-world-adjacent themes, while several detailed positive reviews don't raise the issue at all. This isn't a case this review can or should settle — it's a genuine, substantive disagreement among readers about tone and thematic execution, and it's worth reporting plainly rather than resolving on the reader's behalf, since which side of it a given player lands on will likely determine a great deal of their overall experience.

Final Verdict

The Book of Hungry Names is, by its own community's account, a genuinely accomplished piece of interactive fiction — dense, lore-respectful and ambitious enough to draw favourable Disco Elysium comparisons from readers who don't hand those out lightly. What holds it back from a stronger score are concrete, fixable-sounding gaps: no proper save system in a game long and consequential enough to badly need one, and a DLC structure that locks core content behind a same-day purchase. Layered on top of that is a tonal approach to its antagonists and themes that a real, vocal share of its own readers find heavy-handed, while others find it earned and worthwhile — a genuine split this review can only report, not resolve. For World of Darkness fans specifically, it's worth reading; for everyone else, go in aware of both the technical friction and the tonal choices before committing.