A major strength of Xbox Game Pass is its ability to shine a light on a swath of lower-budget games and indie titles that many people would have just passed by only a few years ago. During last year’s Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase, one of the standout titles was a game called Ravenlok, which stood out in no small part to its striking visual style. Now that the game has finally been released, Ravenlok is a fun albeit simple fantasy action game with a strong sense of style.
Developed by Cococucumber, a small Canadian indie studio known for games like Echo Generation and Riverbond, Ravenlok is a fairytale adventure following a young girl who gets pulled into a magic mirror and ends up discovering she is the prophesied Ravenlok, a hero that will stop the evil Caterpillar Queen and clear her corruption from this mystical land. From a narrative standpoint, the written story is fairly basic. There are a few characters you interact with throughout the game, some of them are able to swim above the others and become memorable in their own ways, but many of them don’t have much development or character building which makes it hard to feel any sort of attachment to them. The story won’t surprise or shock you, but what’s there isn’t bad.
The strongest aspect of the game is its presentation through both its visuals and audio. Ravenlok, like other games from Cococucumber, utilizes a 3D voxel-based art style that looks great in motion. Its blending of 3D environments and models with pixel art aesthetic and colors give it tremendous charm while feeling simultaneously modern and retro. The lighting is also particularly impressive, giving many of the levels an almost painterly look that sets the mood of a given area well. On the topic of setting the mood, the music is also very well done, the orchestral score is bombastic when paired with a huge boss fight and light and ethereal when exploring a dark forest. Performance-wise, Ravenlok ran beautifully. I never had any sort of stuttering. There is some wonkiness with some of the mechanics but nothing that seemed like it was a bug breaking the game. And the load times were near instant which was pretty surprising. In all aspects of presentation, Ravenlok is as great to look at as it is to listen to.
Before discussing the gameplay, I’d like to take a moment to mention the game’s length, which is important for contextualizing a few of my criticisms to come. Ravenlok took me about 4 hours to complete nearly 100% (missed a few collectibles along the journey). If you are looking for a grand fantasy adventure to dedicate your life to, this game isn’t it. However, if you are like me and are just looking for something short and sweet to keep you busy over a weekend, then Ravenlok fits the bill. I wanted to state upfront that while I’m about to get into some issues I have with aspects of the game’s design, the runtime being as relatively short as it is actually benefits the game because it doesn’t overstay its welcome, a mistake that many games big and small can find themselves making.
Getting into the gameplay, Ravenlok is an action game with basic combat implementation. The fundamentals of combat are broken up into 3 actions each tied to a different face button; attack, block, and dash. Unlike other 3D action games that have both light and heavy attacks, Ravenlok just has a standard attack which ends up feeling and animating like a light attack in those other games. The block move will eliminate any incoming damage from the direction you are facing, and the dash move is useful for getting in and out of tough spots during a fight, as well as speeding up traversing the environment. As you play the game, Ravenlok will gain access to a couple of different abilities that act like special moves as well as consumable items like bombs and health potions that can be used during combat.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with having a simple combat system, the issue is that the combat never really evolves in any meaningful way throughout the game. The enemies often have very interesting visual designs, but they are not very aggressive. Oftentimes you will have to walk up to an enemy and initiate the fight which feels a bit odd when the world is set up as being corrupted and hostile. On top of that, Ravenlok’s attack move can stagger the enemy she is attacking very easily which means there’s not much threat of taking damage in a one-on-one scenario. Because of this stagger, I almost never ended up using the block move, because it was simply more efficient to just stagger the enemy and occasionally dodge out of the way of an incoming attack. The “difficulty” then comes from managing larger groups of enemies, but as long as you are slashing your sword in the odd direction to hit anyone surrounding you or throw in the occasional dash, you will likely complete most combat encounters without breaking a sweat. NOTE: As of the publishing of this review, a patch has been released that adds in easy, normal, and hard difficulty options. Seeing as these were not present during my play session, I can’t comment on the specific changes each one brings, but felt it was worth notifying any future readers.
Another enemy you will have to contend with from time to time is the game’s camera. Ravenlok is a 3D game, but the developers often frame the game in a specific and considered way. While you explore in 3D, the camera will oftentimes be pulled back and positioned in a way that looks like you are playing in 2D or the camera will track your character in a specific way. You have a small amount of flexibility in moving the exact angle the camera is positioned in, but it ultimately feels quite restrictive in many areas. The point where this can become a bit of an annoyance is when certain enemies or bosses fall into the camera’s blindspot, making you lose track of an enemy’s position mid-fight. While I was a fan of the more intentional framing of the camera work, it was in these few moments that I wished I could have just a bit more control over where I could look.
The special moves and consumable items serve to shake up the gameplay a bit, but similar to how I basically never used the block button, your mileage with these mechanics will vary. Some of the special moves are quite beneficial, like a spell that shoots out multiple ice projectiles that track nearby enemies, or a hard-hitting downward sword slash that spawns plumes of fire that offer great damage. On the other hand, there is a special attack that unleashes a flurry of sword attacks that just ends up being slower than your normal attack and they don’t deal much more damage, and a lunging attack that seemed to have an odd hitbox that would miss more than it seemed it should. The health potion items ended up being particularly useful, but only because the most efficient way to tackle fights came down to absorbing damage while endlessly attacking and healing when low on health. Both the healing potions and the bomb items can be purchased from vendors or rewarded upon completing certain quests, so they aren’t exactly a scarce resource. There are different types of bombs but the only thing that really changes between them is their damage output. If using a bomb, the game essentially pauses allowing you to choose a target to use it on, so the bombs essentially act as a free hit of damage on a given enemy or boss. On paper it’s not a bad system, it was again just a system I didn’t end up using much because it was more fun and efficient to just attack with my sword and an occasional special move. In general, the combat is fine, it just isn’t very engaging. However, with the game’s 4-hour runtime, it also doesn’t ever get to the point of becoming boring or laborious to engage in.
The area of combat that the game excels at the most is its boss fights. Visually, the bosses have the most detailed and creative designs, I particularly loved some of the bosses from an area set in a clock tower. The bosses here were giant animals made of metal and gears much like a clock. They were very impressive and were well-animated. Some of the bosses do have unique mechanics that change up the fight. One battle would raise towers out of the ground that needed to be destroyed before being able to damage the boss, while another would send out a flurry of projectiles that would need to be dodged before being able to draw the boss over to where you could fight it. Some of the bosses seemingly had an area right up next to them that you could stand near to get under their attacks which made those fights a bit easier than I believe was intended. Similar to the base combat, these fights are not all that challenging, but at least they shake up the combat in more interesting ways and are more engaging.
Outside of combat, the bulk of your time will be spent exploring and completing quests for various characters. As this is a fantasy world, the levels that you explore end up being quite creative and out there visually. From the dark swampy forests to a twisted tea party surrounded by massive piles of rotting food, each area is distinct and I felt the drive to explore just to see what other cool environments I would come across. And despite what you may think reading my statement that the game could look retro due to the voxel graphics, both exteriors, and interiors are packed with detail and things to find, like little collectible bunny figures that in a very quirky way need to be danced in front of in order to collect. The world is small enough that you rarely get lost or confused, but big enough to still feel like you are actually exploring an unknown land.
Ravenlok’s quest structure presents itself as being pretty open, but it feels more linear in execution. At the start of the game, when you are truly starting your journey it feels as though every character you talk to has a quest for you. Most of these quests revolved around clearing out a group of enemies or finding a specific item. At the start this felt overwhelming, I wasn’t 30 minutes into the game and had about 8 different quests in my quest log. But as I played the game, I discovered that a lot of the quests that require a specific item, you will find at the end of a given level or rewarded by completing a different quest. This served to subtly guide the player through the various parts of the game, but in retrospect this funneling made the game feel a lot smaller that I think was intended. The other quests that involved taking out enemies and the like usually rewarded bombs or health potions for completing them which was fine but ultimately not a greatly satisfying reward. You use the same sword throughout the entire game, so it maybe would have been nice to get some different weapons or customization items (there are hats you can find after beating specific bosses).
Dialogue with NPCs can often be a bit weird as well. It works best when a character is describing their role or sharing some lore of the world, like a piano player that can’t remember how to end the song they are playing for a concert. But after you speak with an NPC, they often don’t have anything additional to say. Even upon returning to them after completing some quests, they just sit in the same spot you last saw them and repeat the same short conversation. Some characters and conversations can even be discovered out of the story order of the game, that is to say on a couple of occasions I got into a conversation with a character that mentioned a goal I was working towards that I had no clue about, only to explore further and find the character that issued me the goal after the fact. It would have been nice to see a little bit more fleshing out of the conversations in these areas.
While that may have sounded like a lot of drawbacks, I want to reiterate that Ravenlok is a fun game that is visually astonishing. The gameplay isn’t as developed as it could be and there is definitely room for improvements if a sequel were to be made in the future. If you are looking for a short fantasy escape that won’t push you too hard or are just looking for a new indie game to support, Ravenlok is a pretty decent choice. Ravenlok is available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Xbox Game Pass, and PC via Steam and Epic Game Store.
You should take part in a contest for one of the best blogs on the web. I will recommend this site!