When Wolf Fades casts you as the Big Bad Wolf, framed for murder and forced to hide behind a dead crime boss’s identity. The setting is Dark City, a grimy fairytale underworld where the Little Mermaid smuggles contraband through the port and gnomes handle the dirty work. You run the empire from a desk, send thugs out on jobs, and try to keep anyone from realizing the boss everyone calls “Grandma” is an impostor.
Quick answer: It is a single-player noir crime management and strategy game where you play the disguised Big Bad Wolf running two rival gangs over roughly 30 days, planned for release in 2027 on PC via Steam.
The setup: an impostor at the top of the underworld
Grandma is dead, but her criminal operation keeps running. The Wolf discovers her body, takes her red hood and glasses, and steps into her role as Dark City’s fixer. Her gang of gnomes, the Red Caps, believe they are answering to their boss. The Wolf’s own pack still treats him as their rightful leader. Neither side knows they now serve the same person.
The deadline is the full moon, roughly a month away. Each in-game day brings a new problem to solve, a deal to cut, or a threat to manage, and the disguise grows harder to hold as suspicion builds. Alongside keeping both gangs in line, the Wolf has to work out who wanted Grandma gone and why.
The story is told partly through animated comic panels that fill in the Wolf’s backstory and the betrayals around him, cut between the management screens where you actually run the city.
Two gangs as two decks of cards
You command two separate crews, each represented as a deck of cards. The Red Caps are Grandma’s gnome crew, and the Pack is the Wolf’s own group of wolves. Work is handled from an overhead map of the city, where you plot routes and dispatch henchmen to districts to deal with whatever has come up. Events fall into opportunities and problems, with titles like “Wet Dreams,” “The Pack,” and “Can’t Save Everyone.”
Every henchman is an individual card with its own stats, a hiring cost, and recurring payment upkeep. The crew shown includes wolves named Vince, Whip, and Brick, and Red Cap gnomes Biba, Boba, and Plus. The attributes that drive their performance are consistent across both gangs.
- Intellect
- Agility
- Health
- Attack
- Defense
Because each hire costs money up front and keeps costing you in upkeep, managing the roster is part of the strategy. The Wolf narrates the tension between the two groups directly, and some events resolve conflicts between the crews rather than against outside targets.
How jobs are resolved: dialogue choices and dice rolls
Assignments play out as branching dialogue choices backed by attribute-based skill checks. When you pick an action, the game rolls dice against the relevant stat and a target number, and the result decides what happens next. You can lean on muscle or on cunning depending on the operatives you send and the approach you choose.
The checks seen so far map directly to the henchman stats. An “Eavesdrop” action at the Wet Dreams cabaret calls for an Agility check at difficulty 3, with a successful roll shown as 7 against a 3. Other options include deceiving targets on Intellect, fighting on Strength, or simply choosing to run.
Combat works the same way. A port job titled “Clothes” pits your operatives against watchmen through a Strength check at difficulty 4, shown succeeding on a roll of 20 against 4. Finishing a job pays out rewards such as Gold and special items; one Bluebeard mission hands over Gold along with Bluebeard’s medal and the Mermaid’s card.
Rival bosses and the police closing in
Dark City is split between six crime bosses, and each relies on a fixer to handle the fallout from their schemes. The Wolf has taken on that job. The cast turns fairy-tale characters into underworld figures: Bluebeard, the Little Mermaid, who smuggles goods through the port, the Tooth Fairy, who runs the nightclubs, and Morozko, whose skill is keeping corpses fresh.
These rivals are not just quest-givers. Their greed is something you are meant to play on, turning their interests against one another, and any weakness in your disguise is an opening they will push. Trust the wrong one and you pay for it.
On top of the bosses, Police Chief O’Hara is working the murder of the mayor and confronts the disguised Wolf directly. A nighttime raid event shows O’Hara surrounding the player with handcuffs ready, making the law a constant pressure alongside the rival factions.
Platform, release window, and playtest
When Wolf Fades is a single-player PC game listed for Windows, with a release planned for 2027. The Steam listing currently shows “Coming soon,” and no firm launch date has been confirmed yet. It supports nine languages, with full English and Russian audio and subtitles in the rest, including French, German, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, and both Chinese scripts.
Applications for a playtest are open on the game’s Steam page, letting participants try the opening of the Wolf’s story and feed back to the developer before launch. You can request access and wishlist the game from its Steam store page.
The system requirements are modest, listing a 2.0 GHz processor, a DirectX 9 compatible GPU, and 3 GB of storage, with 2 GB of RAM as the minimum and 8 GB recommended.
Who is making it
The game is developed by Hoolignomes and published by Watt Studio. The studio formed in 2021 and builds its identity around recurring gnome mascots, placing them in different roles across games in different genres rather than one continuous series. Its previous title was the deck-building roguelite Union of Gnomes, which launched on Steam in 2025.
The pitch for Dark City is that every day should feel like a new episode of a crime series, full of twists, and the developer has said more mechanics and characters are still planned beyond what the playtest covers. For now, the clearest way to follow it is the Steam page and the wishlist, with the full release targeted for 2027.
