For fans of visual novels and social deduction games, Raging Loop is an intriguing option. You play Haruaki Fusaishi, a college student who ends up in a town called Yasumizu. It’s a game with interesting characters and multiple endings that make you want to play it repeatedly.
A Long Night Out
Following the break-up with a girlfriend, you follow Haruaki Fusaishi as he journeys into the mountains. However, he finds himself lost at night and looks for a place to stay. After a weird interaction with a convenience store worker, he finds himself lost deep in the forest. A woman named Chiemi Serizawa rescues him and lets him stay at her place. The next day they wake up and soon Haruaki realizes the place he walked into is strange. He tries to leave the village several times, only to be thwarted at every opportunity.
Suddenly, a strange mist creeps into the village, and everyone starts to panic. Haruaki hides, only to hear noises outside. Once he runs outside, he is killed by a werewolf. At this point, the game lets you pick different paths to see what happens if you stay hiding. Haruaki retains previous knowledge about how he died and everything leading up to that event. After surviving the night, you learn about the werewolves. You learn about something called the Feast of the Yomi-Purge. Two werewolves are selected to kill everyone in the village before they are taken out by the humans.
Isn’t That Just Werewolf?
Just like in Werewolf, there are specialty roles that can help protect other humans and figure out who the werewolves are. I think the thing that frustrated me the most about the first part of the game is that you are a background character, just watching helplessly as a werewolf game is going on, and you can’t participate or make choices that impact the story. You find out about the different roles in the game. There is the snake, which can investigate who is human and who the werewolves are. Two monkeys who know who the other monkey is and can out each other to confirm they are human. The spider acts as a medic and can protect a werewolf from killing someone for a night.
This frustration continued until the end of the first ending. Each time you complete an ending of the game, good or bad, you get a key that unlocks a different choice at certain points in the story. After reaching the game’s first ending, the game loops you back to the beginning with more dialogue options. Still, Harukai retained the knowledge from the first ending. What I enjoyed about this game is that it subverts my expectations often You go into a new playthrough expecting one thing and you end up with a completely different story. I had one complaint about the game, and it was the pacing. The first playthrough was rough to get through, and not being able to make fun choices slowed down the experience for me.
The Wolf Among Us
Raging Loop is a visual novel game that brings you into a village in the middle of a game of Werewolf. However, there are actual wolves and people die. The unfortunate part about this game is that it took a while before I felt like I was having fun. Watching NPCs play a game of werewolf isn’t the most fun start to the game, but once you can impact how the werewolf games play out, I felt myself become a lot more invested. The characters are interesting, and the different branching paths encourage you to go back and play through the game over and over again. Visual novel fans looking for a fun story with multiple endings and a social deduction game should check out Raging Loop.
