Ritual of Raven: Nostalgic and magical

As an unapologetic fan of Sticky Business with hours and hours of gameplay time under my belt, crafting my own stickers, I’ve had Spellgarden Games’ upcoming cozy life sim, Ritual of Raven, on my Steam wishlist for a very long time. As part of Steam Next Fest, a demo has become available to play on Steam, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I jumped on that immediately. 

Ritual of Raven is a cozy life sim that throws a normal, non-magical person into a magical world filled with wonder and whimsy. You become a magical apprentice under Sage, a resident of this new world, and gradually learn how to perform magic to make it a better place and control the portals that keep opening up. 

There are wonderful characters to meet, an open map to explore, countless items to pick up and hoard like a pixelated Smaug, and touches of brilliant humor along the way. 

Learning how to programme Constructs

I’m not sure if this is a universal experience, or just one that I had during my childhood years at school, but does anyone else remember those little robots that you’d programme to follow set paths and perform certain actions? It was called a “Roamer Robot”, and I had so much fun plotting different paths for it to follow as a kid. 

I promise, there’s a point to this nostalgic memory drop. 

In Ritual of Raven, you cannot perform farming tasks yourself. Something about how doing it by hand will deplete the magic in the plants. However, you can use creatures called “Constructs” to do the jobs for you. With the help of various tarot cards that you’ll discover around the map, you can program these Constructs to plant, water, plow, clean up, and harvest. 

Just like Roamer Robot, these Constructs rely on your inputting the correct instructions to make sure that they can complete their tasks. You instruct them to move a certain number of spaces, complete an action, and then repeat until everything is complete. 

It’s a unique mechanic that I’ve not come across in any other cozy farming sim, not to mention the massive wave of nostalgia that washed over me as the memory of Roamer Robot was awakened in my mind. 

Character art in different forms 

One staple of cozy life sim games is the character portraits for the NPCs that you meet through your in-game journey. They bring these small, pixelated characters to life, showing off the details of their face and their many expressions. Ritual of Raven goes one step further and adds a character portrait for your character, and it changes depending on your choices when creating or editing your character. 

Ritual of Raven isn’t short on options when creating a character, either. There are multiple options not only for the item (hat, glasses, hair, clothes), but also multiple color options for those items. Doing some quick (possibly wrong, don’t take this as gospel) math, there are around 90 million unique combinations coded to appear, depending on your chosen options when making your character. 

However you look at it, that’s pretty impressive. 

Suddenly, I love ‘fishing’

I can only assume that Spellgarden Games are intent on sparking nostalgia in the weirdest ways with Ritual of Raven, because not only have I spent hours (more than I should have, honestly) programming the Constructs to plant and harvest seeds, but I’ve also discovered a love for their version of fishing that is going to bankrupt me. 

Fishing in Ritual of Raven is actually a claw grabber mini-game. You spend Shards (four at a time) to move the claw, and drop it over a portal to grab things from the ‘other side’. Like being at the arcade as a child, there’s a spark of excitement when you line your claw up with a shadow below, and finding out what you grabbed is like opening a mystery bag or booster pack of cards. 

At one point, I managed to grab two shadows in one drop and did a passable, unexpected impression of Sid in Toy Story as he pulls Buzz and Woody out of the claw machine at Pizza Planet. 

Magical woodland creatures

In the demo, you have the chance to meet a variety of different residents of Nevar Villager. There’s Pistachio, the local furniture store owner, Bowie, with dreams of putting on a killer performance, Coco and Charley, a Squirrel and Hedgehog couple who are utterly charming, and Dan, a grumpy yet lovable raven chef. 

You’ve also got Sage, of course, although her tenure as your tutor is short-lived, ending when she throws herself through a portal in the hopes of finding her own familiar while leaving you in the “trusty” hands of your own familiar, Raven. 

Raven is, for lack of a better term, shady. Sage leaves you with him because he should be able to tell you everything you need to know, and yet he doesn’t seem to know anything himself. He’s very cute, though, and I’m sure he’ll come into his own eventually, but for now, Ritual of Raven feels like a case of trial and error in all the best ways. 

Each character has quests to complete, and each quest teaches you something new that can be done with your Constructs. Want your crops to grow instantly? There’s a card for that. Want to quickly tell your Construct to plow an entire field? There’s one for that, too, and all of them are gained through completing quests with the lovable characters you meet. 

Controller vs. Keyboard

90% of the time, I’m a die-hard fan of keyboard controls, so I always instinctively try to play everything on keyboard first, and Ritual of Raven plays absolutely fine on keyboard. It also plays absolutely fine with a controller, so you can play with either and not face any significant issues. 

However, certain things feel better using a keyboard and mouse, while other things feel better with a controller. For instance, general movement and interacting with the world around you feel a lot smoother and easier with a controller, although that could just be me and my irrational dislike of using the F button to interact with things (it should be E, and nobody can convince me otherwise). 

On the other hand, trying to input instructions for your Constructs feels awkward with a controller, but a breeze using a mouse and keyboard. Inventory management also feels a lot less clunky with a mouse and keyboard, too. Being able to click and drag items is nicer than having to constantly move one slot at a time using a controller, and the cards are simply easier to control and navigate through if you don’t have to manually go through all of them to get to the one you want.

As it stands, I found myself using a strange combination of the two, picking up my controller when it was time to explore and putting it down in favor of the mouse when I needed to control my Constructs. This isn’t a huge deal, and rest assured that if you don’t want to do this, it’s easy to adjust to either option. I’m just picky.

A demo that doesn’t disappoint

Overall, Ritual of Raven has proven to be a rare demo of a long-awaited game that doesn’t disappoint. I’ve been burned, countless times at this point, by games that overpromise and underdeliver, but Ritual of Raven is shaping up to be the opposite of that. I can’t wait to buy the full game when it’s released on August 7, and can see myself pouring hundreds of hours into programming Constructs alone. 

The demo is available to play now through Steam, and if you want to keep up to date with development or be around for critical announcements as they happen in the run-up to release on August 7, you can join the Spellgarden Games Discord server.