need to know
what is that? A hack-and-slash action-adventure inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
release date May 4, 2023
expect to pay $25/£19.79
developer coco cucumber
the publisher coco cucumber
review date Windows 11, Nvidia 2080 Ti, Intel i9-9900k @ 4.9ghz, 32GB RAM
steam deck not supported
Link Official site (opens in new tab)
Aesthetically at least, Ravenlok makes a great first impression against a backdrop of beautifully lit farms, populated by detailed (yet pleasantly chunky) voxel people. A girl is sitting in the shade of a tree and playing with her dog. She asks for the girl’s name and what accessories her faithful dog wears. And so the fetch quest begins and continues until the moment the credits roll.
Despite being a hack-and-slash action game, Ravenlok alternates between two small (but beautifully detailed) scenes, two immobile NPCs (the young heroine’s parents), and only when requested to do so. , to collect a set of items. The item remains stubbornly glued to the ground until it is requested to be retrieved in the quest log. Rules that are frustratingly valid throughout the game.
A fetch quest turns a girl (never seen or mentioned again, except for her dog) into a finely dressed rabbit, a Tweedle (both dumb and dee breeds), and a villainous queen. will lead you to Dunia, the magical realm of In the surly Trump army. There are some strangely named special creatures, the heroine is known as “Ravenlok” because of her dark hair, but most rabbits have her four arms, and the Red Queen too. A caterpillar of unknown origin.
It’s an absolute treat to watch, as its inspiration is well-known. Ravenlok is a pseudo-retro aesthetic triumph. All environments are packed with detail rendered with unfiltered textures, packed with voxelized decorations and perfectly lit. It ran smoothly and we didn’t encounter any technical issues, but that’s probably due to Ravenlok’s limited ambitions. Because you can’t, you’ll always be able to see it from the perfect angle, making it easier to appreciate. Give these fantasy environments the feel of a toy diorama or a voxelized stage play. It feels like a world to observe and appreciate from a distance, rather than to play with.
Until about 30 minutes have passed, Ravenlok is only fetching objects for non-moving characters, such as having to rustle swords and shields. By the time the game introduced combat (after yet another fetch quest to find the sword and shield), I couldn’t help but feel the game creaking a bit. A combat tutorial then begins, fading to black and transporting the player to a flatter, more open and less detailed version of the area, designed entirely for combat. This trick is only used occasionally, and while some of the explorable areas have enemies, it happens often enough to feel that Coco Cumber doesn’t quite understand how to reconcile the action with low-key exploration. It doesn’t help either that the combat is almost upsettingly monophonic.
snacks
Simple one-note combat isn’t inherently bad, as long as that one is pleasing. It’s fun to play Dynasty Warriors and Lego Star Wars here and there. I’m a big fan of the Ys series. Unfortunately, the most audible sound over Ravenlok’s length is the sharp, artificial impact noise used for every possible combat interaction. From breaking pottery, to cutting plant monsters, to smashing an arbitrary crystal macguffin at the end of each world, all emit the same small, slightly distorted “tink” sound, and the highest Drown out thoughts and nothing more. There are no jump buttons or combos, just a “swing sword” button.
Unfortunately, almost all of Ravenlok’s combat consists of confronting enemies and mashing the attack button to stun them into oblivion. Sometimes it hits dozens more times per enemy, but it’s mostly the same note, with little other punctuation. but against rank-and-file monsters you have nothing to do but mash the “attack” as fast as you can. If an enemy becomes too spongy, he quickly returns to one his NPC, who can convert the experience gained into a constant stat increase and repeat.
Even the game’s four unlockable special attacks (two melee attacks, two projectiles bound to the four shoulder buttons on most gamepads) have little to inspire recipes. It works on cooldown, speeding up the process of clearing out swarms of regular enemies and further dwarfing boss fights with a generous invulnerability frame. The boss fights themselves are relatively interesting (at least compared to the monsters in general), the animations are smooth, and you can even attack them with telegraphs, but the camera is fixed so you can’t see behind or behind large monsters. It’s easy to get lost underneath.Reduce combat to random flares again until you reposition your character.
Alice in Chains
An exciting story told with beautiful backdrops and creative creature designs would have forgiven many of these mechanical shortcomings, but sadly the plot feels as corny as the combat. Each designated character will stand at a designated location and either explain why they need Ravenlok’s help or simply threaten Ravenlok until the battle begins. There is no room for character growth, and dialogue is completely silent and handled in speech bubbles above the characters’ heads, while both participants often stand side by side facing the camera, creating a hollow pantomime. gives the feeling of
No drama, no escalation, no depth.
No drama, no escalation, no depth. Ravenrock himself is absent-minded and cheerfully takes on all requests.There are occasional hints that indicate dark things are afoot in Wonderland Dunia, but they remain unexplored and under the rug. The ominous undercurrent that obscures these moments, I believe, is the intention of the author, but the emptiness of the script (Ravenlok exchanging only a few lines of dialogue with each (despite all strange creatures as her friends and family), there is nothing substantial here. Even for a kid’s game, it sounds hollow, with a few selective grammatical errors and missing words in the script giving it an amateur vibe.
I hope my complaints end here, but perhaps the most jarring part of the whole Ravenlok experience is how it all feels disjointed. They are connected in a very tenuous way. Access each of the three worlds via teleports or NPCs. The NPC fades out to black and suddenly moves to a new location. We could have accepted the weird, surreal, dreamy links between areas, but Ravenlok says he just jump-cuts from one screen to the next. Disturbingly, some boss fights also take place in arenas completely different from where the enemies were encountered, returning to ‘reality’ with the bosses defeated.
Ravenlok’s limited content is already spread thin, but it feels stretched to breaking point in the last hour. The late-game Clock Tower area is introduced as a sort of boss Rush for him, requiring him to claim 3 coins from 3 floors to progress. His first two floors have a fight, but on the third floor his NPC casually gives him his third coin. In the exact same room you have to insert them into the machine to continue, but nothing happens. rice field. Any sense of escalation or drama is completely lost, and even the area’s impressive environments and boss designs are sour.
handsome pig
This arbitrary padding continues through the endgame, including one room that reaches a switch that’s too high. You have to pull the lever down literally two steps to lower it. With little to do in each environment, adding just one button prompt to the scene doubles the amount of interaction he has.
The final stretch – Attack on the Queen’s Castle – is where Ravenlok’s gameplay budget feels like it’s gone completely. As usual, the environment is immaculate, but the entire final zone is only five rooms. An entrance courtyard, a hall, two side rooms, and a final boss room. Meanwhile, the game has a (mercifully short and easy) stealth segment and he attempts to introduce five new enemy types. There is very little room in this content, so we can’t afford to spawn all the new enemy types at once. To fight them all (needed to progress), I had to hit a switch to change the type displayed in the two side rooms.
Ravenlok is clearly a game made with passion and clear artistic intent, so it pains me to be as hard on Ravenlok as ever. But throughout its 5-6 hour run time, it never shakes the feeling that this is a showcase of environmental art (and a beautifully polished showcase) with minimal gameplay layered on top. bottom. It’s kid-friendly in both tone and difficulty, but it pales in comparison to other games aimed at a younger audience. Like the finest porcelain tea sets, it’s best left on the shelf to be admired, rather than brought out to entertain at parties.
