Play Wicked Tales: Dark Red for Free

As Halloween approaches, the studio has turned the famed Red Riding Hood fairy tale into a horror-themed game. There’s a male vampire instead of the old granny luring the innocent girl into the forest of Ravenmire, which serves as a fitting background to the five slot reels. The small house from the original tale can be seen on the right of the game window. Vibrant colors and sharp graphics give the slot a high-quality feel. A dark soundtrack with dramatic crescendos on winning spins completes a well-designed game.

The slot has 10 pay symbols, one wild symbol and a scatter. The low-paying end consists of artistic Js to As, while the medium-value level sees red candles and a bag of gold coins. The four premium symbols are an intricately designed tile with a pendant, a wolf, the male vampire and Red Riding Hood. The slot’s logo is the wild and top-paying symbol. The scatters are a full moon, with a minimum of three required to trigger the bonus game.

Wicked Tales: Dark Red is a video slot with five reels, three rows and 25 fixed paylines. It features wild substitutions, Wandering Reels, and a bonus game with coin wins and two bonus rounds. The RTP of this medium-variance game is set at 96.10%, and its HTML5 format means it can be played on desktop, mobile, and tablet across all OS platforms. AutoPlay allows players to choose from 10 to 100 spins to be played consecutively.

Wandering into the Ravenmire forest comes at a charge of 0.25 to 200 coins. Pays for a single five of a kind range from 1.20 to 20x the initial stake. The maximum win in a single bonus round peaks at a massive 5,000x your bet.

The signature feature of Triple Edge Studios is Wandering Reels, already seen on their Halloween slot. A block of three reels with four rows of symbols spins together in every round, while the block moves randomly to one of three positions on the game window – left, middle and right. The three connected reels contain jumbo symbols in the size of 3x3 symbols, which provides more potential to hit big wins.

Hitting three moon scatters will trigger the Wolf’s Bonus Wheel. This guarantees one of the two features on the slot: the Forest of Fortune Pick Bonus and a free spins round. The wheel contains wedges with coin wins of up to 20x the stake as well as the two features. Players will turn the wheel and collect the coin wins when the wheel lands on those wedges, until one of the two features is awarded.

The Forest of Fortune Pick Bonus is a pick-and-click game where players select one bag at a time to reveal coin wins of 1x to 5x the total bet, an axe that awards one extra pick, and a wolf that stops the round. Up to 10 bags contain coin wins. After each successful pick, the win multiplier increases by 1x – which can reach 10x if all 10 bags are picked. The final multiplier will be applied to the total bonus round winnings. A special reward of 20x the total stake is awarded when all 10 bags are found, but this will not be multiplied.

Hitting one of the wedges with a character pay symbol will award nine free spins, which cannot be retriggered. The symbol that awarded the round will replace all other high-paying symbols during the free spins, providing more potential to hit mega wins.

We all love that little bit of horror in our lives, be it in movies, during Halloween, or when visiting some supposedly haunted places. More of that suspense and excitement can be found on the spooky reels of The Dark Joker Rizes from Yggdrasil Gaming and Lord of the Darkness from Stakelogic.

Loading the slot gave us the impression that Microgaming rushed to release a slot before Halloween and ended up creating a rather exact clone of last year’s contribution to the spooky season. Let there be no misunderstanding: the slot is well designed, the characters look really authentic, and the animations when those jumbo symbols land are stunning. But we wish Microgaming and Triple Edge Studios had used a little more creativity and maybe some new features.

However, the medium variance and regular smallish wins will provide for lengthy sessions on the slot, even with just a small balance. The top win potential is surely enticing enough to spin the reels. Ready to accompany Red Riding Hood into Ravenmire?