Become the Raven’s vessel and defeat the betrayer to restore the island of Ávalt in Ravenbound.
Systemic Reaction is taking another shot at fame with their latest creation, Ravenbound. Systemic Reaction is actually a group of veteran developers who operate within Avalance Studios with locations in several parts of the world, though while they might be small, they’re a fierce group to be reckoned with. Systemic Reaction’s main focus for game development leans towards freedom and exploration in games, and they might have missed the mark with Second Extinction (A first-person hack and slash) released in 2020 since it wasn’t quite as open or explorable. However, Ravenbound might actually be the game that will redeem them on make their values clear again.
Ravenbound is an open-world roguelite with a few interesting twists; taking a trick or two from other games might seem like a damning move, but they balance each other quite well in this case. Unfortunately, Ravenbound isn’t quite as perfect as we’d like it to be, and there is still so much room for more improvement, polishing, and maybe even more content.
On the Island of Ávalt, there was peace for as long as everybody can remember, or at least as long as the Ellri have been around to protect the people. The Ellri consists of 6 gods, each one embodying a primal aspect. Everything was peaceful until the 6th god’s mind became corrupted and twisted, her entire being filled with hate. She set out to spread hatred and death across the lands. All those she touched were influenced by the hatred she spread, but the remaining five gods protected those they could with their light. Those same gods did, however, come up with a plan to bring down the 6th god, now referred to as The Betrayer.
The Ellri pooled their power together to create a weapon and being in one, strong enough to defeat the betrayer, though during this ritual they were weakened and vulnerable. The Betrayer saw an opportunity to remove the Ellri so that her reign couldn’t be stopped, by interrupting the ritual and sealing them in tombs of her own creation. However, even though the ritual was interrupted, the raven was still born but went unnoticed. So it lays in wait for a vessel to empower and finally defeat The Betrayer.
The vessel in question is you, or one of many vessels. In Ravenbound, nothing lasts forever but you can certainly keep trying. Your journey starts as a new vessel for the raven, and your objective is simple – Free the Elrii, finish the ritual, and defeat The Betrayer. Though completing your objective is a whole other nightmare, because if your vessel dies, you start over with nothing. You’ll need to amass power and upgrades through cards that cost mana to use, but getting the cards takes an interesting turn.
Starting over isn’t entirely bad at least. You get a choice between 3 different vessels each time, each vessel with its own set of weapons, folk trait, and starting passive. You’ll have to spend legacy to unlock new passive traits and folk, luckily legacy is quite easily earned through challenges or just general play with each run. The real fun beings with the three types of folk you can choose – You’ll have a choice between human, Ulvar (Wolf People), and Simlar (Deer people). As mentioned, each folk has a unique passive, like gaining 1 mana for each card drained for Simlar or gaining 50 coins for draining a card if you choose human.
Cards are a wonderful tool to strengthen your vessel, some will give you passive upgrades in the form of relics, while others will upgrade your weapons. In both cases, upgrades are essential if you want any chance of taking down the enemies that stand in your way. Though while there are positive card effects, there are also negative cards that strengthen your enemies. Positive or neutral cards will require mana or none respectfully to activate their effects, but negative cards are activated on sight regardless of what you do. You’ll have to choose carefully how you obtain your cards and how far you want to go for a few upgrades.
To obtain cards, you’ll have several options. The most obvious one is by empowering fragments, you’ll be able to pick up fragments from the enemies you defeat, though each set of fragments you empower will also increase your hatred. So, each fragment you collect will take up a slot, and you’ll need 3 to empower them, but hatred can also take up a slot as it builds up.
Your next option would be to open chests, if there’s no hatred tainting the chest, you’ll get a free card to choose from. Though if you have to cleanse the hatred from a chest first, it will take up a fragment slot with hatred. Your last choice, and most likely the most difficult one, is to find a village and buy cards from a merchant, blacksmith, or even gamble. Unfortunately, this option will cost you some coin and coin isn’t exactly easy to come by.
Now you managed to get your hands on a few cards but you’re sitting without the mana to activate them. Unfortunately, mana is a rare commodity from the looks of it but not impossible to get. You’ll need to cleanse Tears of Hatred, these are mini-dungeons typically only guarded by a few people. Your reward is enough mana to activate a card or two and a small area around the area being cleansed of hatred. The alternative is leaving it up to luck with a neutral card that will give you mana. Once again, mindful choices help a lot here and mana is precious, so spend it wisely.
Like with any open-world game, you’ll need a faster method of getting around. Some games have mounts like horses or otherworldly creatures, while others have fast travel. Both of those are typically overused and monotonous. Ravenbound instead allows you to take to the sky as a raven, giving you a bird’s eye view of the land below you while getting around at breakneck speeds.
Though you can’t just transform at will, you’ll need to step onto a Raven Tower if you want to spread your wings again after a fight. These are dotted all over the world and a Raven Tower is never far when you need a quick escape, when you’re ready to head to your next objective, or you simply don’t feel like running on foot like a land bound creature.
Ravenbound wouldn’t be a roguelite if there wasn’t some form of combat. While a lot can be said about it. Combat in Ravenbound is fast-paced but mostly balanced as well. Depending on the passives you get with your new vessel, that also plays a huge factor in what type of weapons you’ll have access to.
Weapons like the double axes are generally extremely fast but are not meant for staggering enemies, instead they’re more aimed towards quick attacks combined with a lot of dodging. While the longsword is slow, it can deal massive amounts of damage combined with high stagger strength. Normally this would mean that dodging is impacted too, but attacks, guards and dodges can be chained together for a more fluid motion.
What gives the combat an interesting edge are the dodge and guard mechanics, but they come with a downside as well. Dodging at just the right moment does make chaining a dodge and attack together possible for a seamless movement, this also gives you the Frenzied buff which in turn, gives you more speed overall. However, your enemies can gain the same buff too. The guard mechanic is the more favourable move to make but it’s not perfect either.
Guarding at the right time will cause the barrier you raise to explode outward, knocking enemies over similar to a parry. However, just as you have health, your guard has health too. If your guard health runs out, it’s basically gone for a short while until it regenerates.
The last mechanic that could’ve been great is your trusty grapple, also known as the Raven Claw. The Ravenclaw, while completely functional, seems a bit clunky. Normally your grappling hook is supposed to hook onto things above you, like when you’re climbing over walls or up a mountain. In this case, the Raven Claw will hook onto anything, including the ground you’re on. Landing your Raven Claw will then throw you forward or over, what would be a better is if you could instead climb up or rappel down. Once again, there was so much potential for a brilliant mechanic.
Ravenbound’s character design, while random with each new vessel, shows real effort with each iteration. Even though there isn’t a character creator, the randomly generated vessels show quite a lot of detail and they don’t look out of place at all. This is, sadly where the praise for visuals comes to a screeching halt as we take a closer look at the world itself. The island of Ávalt looks amazing from the sky, but on foot it can come off as a bit lacking in some parts, like the Badlands. This does make the game feel rushed in certain aspects.
Unfortunately, the world doesn’t quite randomly regenerate with each new iteration, instead only the tears of hate move to different locations, chests with hatred are randomised but chests in general are still in the same locations, and side quest locations change too but everything stays the same. This starts giving Ravenbound a very monotonous gameplay and can become boring or predictable after a while.
The sound design in Ravenbound, while acceptable, has so much potential to be better. You’ll hear the odd sound here and there from the environment but it’s not enough to fully immerse you, the grunts and voices from your vessels are nice but also incredibly limited. It almost feels like the sounds are quite heavily recycled and reused. Though you’ll hear and see the real beauty in the cinematics being fully voiced to match the cinematic art style, but this isn’t enough to save Ravenbound.
While Ravenbound has a great story and a few good features on the mechanics front, it still needs some improvement. What would help this game shine would be a world overhaul with a randomly generated terrain to keep things interesting and possibly a few minor quality-of-life improvements. While these flaws can take away from the overall experience, Ravenbound does have a lot of potentials to go far. But for now, there’s still a great story and literal mountains of lore to discover, maybe even a Betrayer to defeat.
