Ravenswatch Review – Fractured Fairy Tales

Ravenswatch Review

Hooks. Fishermen need them, pop songs live or die by them, and games disappear without them. Ravenswatch, a new roguelike from the makers of Curse of the Dead Gods, has lots of hooks, from its art style to playable folk tale characters. Those hooks will help it not get lost in a very crowded landscape of games.

The popularity of roguelikes among developers hasn’t diminished much over the past few years. The challenge is to take the formula and add a secret ingredient or two. It’s a tricky genre. You have to make your game addictive enough to make repeated runs enjoyable while doling out rewards at just the right pace. Not many games get it right. 

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad?

Although most folk tales are simultaneously simple and deeply symbolic, Ravenswatch doesn’t have an especially weighty narrative premise. It’s just clever enough to set things up and keep them going. The land of Reverie has been overcome by monsters sprung from under the bed, figuratively speaking. The monster scourge is appropriately called the Nightmare. Who better to fight them than heroes from a range of folk and fairy tales, all of them familiar cultural icons? 

Ravenswatch’s first hook is its entertaining and clever take on familiar figures turned monster hunters. To start, players can choose between Beowulf, Scarlet (Little Red Riding Hood), the Pied Piper, and The Snow Queen, with several others unlockable later, like Sun Wukong, Geppetto, and Aladdin. To start, each character fits into a familiar playstyle, like the Snow Queen using ice magic or Beowulf being a heavy, tanky fighter with a pet dragon. Aladdin swings a mighty scimitar and naturally, Geppetto commands a small army of puppets. Where things turn even more interesting is that, at night, characters transform or gain special powers. Maybe my favorite transformation was Scarlet turning into a ferocious wolf. Ah, sweet irony.

Night and Day

Every run — we’ll, at least every attempted run — consists of four day and night cycles that last 18 minutes with a boss at the end. Maps are procedurally generated and filled with the usual assortment of monsters and treasure. Players earn XP to spend on permanent abilities, and they can use crystal shards to buy upgrades. Just to mix things up, there are some optional side quests for different characters. That timer adds a strategic element. Do you fight everything and risk dying or avoid enemies as much as possible until the boss is unleashed?

Aside from basic attacks, all the special abilities are on cooldown timers of various lengths. Players have a limited number of extra lives during each run. Use them up, and game over.

Lone Wolfing It

Curse of the Dead Gods used a few of the same ideas but it was a single-player focused game. Ravenswatch is really built for four-person co-op and doesn’t always scale well for a solo player. Thanks to some enormous swarms of tough enemies, getting to that final boss can be a huge challenge for a lone fighter. With a group of characters with various abilities, it makes a lot more sense. What could be more fun than Sun Wukong fighting beside the Pied Piper and his rat pack? Still, while solo players aren’t locked out, it’s a shame the game doesn’t allow for an AI-assisted squad.

Ravenswatch has a very attractive, cel-shaded graphic novel art style that is distinctive and appealing, with flashy combat and spell effects and lighting. Characters are inventive and animations are fluid. Being procedurally generated, levels are necessarily a bit visually repetitive but the action doesn’t allow much time for lengthy observation. 

I review a lot of games and I’ll admit that diving into another roguelike isn’t always immediately appealing. But Ravenswatch does enough clever things with its mechanics, art, character design, and premise that I was intrigued and engaged. Ravenswatch demonstrates again that in the hands of talented developers, there’s still a lot of untapped potential in the roguelike genre.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review. Ravenswatch is still in Early Access but has moved to version 1.0***