In Wolfman, you are David.  You wake up one morning in your tiny bedroom and you realize that something bad has happened.

A few commands later and you discover that you are covered in blood.

You are a werewolf!  You’ve already killed and you know that it’s going to happen again unless you find a cure for your condition.  For the rest of this challenging text adventure, it is up to you to figure out how to get out of town and find the cure.  Along the way, you will have to find ways to fight off your urges to kill.

Assuming that you get David out of the village, the game will switch gears and you’ll play from the viewpoint of Nadia, a young woman who falls in love with David and who, for David to continue on his journey and ultimately be cured of his condition, has to spend the night with David without becoming his latest victim.

If you pull that off, the game then switches back to being told from David’s point of view as he attempts to solve the final few puzzles that will lead him to the cure.

Wolfman is one of the many horror-themed text adventures that were written by Rod Pike in the 1980s.  Though the majority of the game is text, there are some graphics, mostly still shots of the werewolf’s victims.  In 1988, the graphics were considered shocking enough to get it an 18 certificate from the British Board of Film Censors.

The first challenge of playing a game like Wolfman today is getting into the right mindset to play a 1980s text adventure.  The game’s vocabulary and list of commands is impressive for 1988 but still extremely limited when compared to what we are used to today.  I spent several turns trapped in my bedroom and growing increasingly frustrated until I finally realized that the game considered “look” and “examine” to be two very different commands.

Once you get passed that, though, it’s an engrossing, well-written, and challenging game, one that puts you right into the mind of both a werewolf and one of his potential victims.  It’s available at the Internet Archive.  And, if you’re like me and you usually have to cheat to solve the puzzles in games like this, a walk-through is available here.