The fairy tale subgenre doesn’t get much spotlight in video games, but I’ve had a fair bit of nostalgia over the years. As an example, Alice: Madness Returns is high on my list of favorite games from the Xbox 360 generation. Ravenlok aims to capture this glory by whisking away its young protagonist from a coming-of-age environment to an enchanted fantasy world where they’re the chosen one destined to save it. How does Ravenlok fare in a tried-and-true trope?

Presented in a charming voxel style, Ravenlok is going to turn a lot of heads thanks to its visual splendor. This extends to the attention to detail that the world gets, as traversing from screen to screen shows a lot of love and care was put into making the fairy-tale setting pop. Going through the forest with a luminescent purple glow and ample shadowing was a delight and the variety between settings is the high point of this game. If the rest of the game was up to this level of quality, it’d be a knockout.

Where Ravenlok goes wrong is in its gameplay, the center of the experience. There are no waypoints and no map to show you where to go. This would be fine if the game had a sense of direction and set you in the right way, but I legitimately had to look up a walkthrough within the first 20 minutes as one necessary item was completely hidden from view and not exactly easy to locate unless you fine-tooth comb the castle. The player should never feel aimless, especially in a game that’s only 3 hours long.

Combat in Ravenlok is nothing to write home about, either. Your first enemies will fall if you do nothing but click the mouse, with no strategy involved. Blocking and dashing would help if the enemies posed any threat, but only the bosses in Ravenlok are going to throw you for a loop. Even then, they’re predictable and easy to exploit. The protagonist feels less like a “chosen one” and more like someone placed in the world doing the easiest of tasks that anyone could manage to do.

There are plenty of side quests within Ravenlok, but here’s the thing: they are all fetch quests. Go to a place, get a certain amount of an item, bring it back, get a reward, rinse, and repeat. At one point early in my playthrough, I had seven different item-based quests open at once. This quest bloat only serves to make the short game’s runtime extended out of sheer tedium, with the player’s takeaway being collecting stuff instead of fulfilling a prophecy in a grand-scale story.

It’s a shame Ravenlok turned out to be a cluttered, unfocused game. Its potential was there and quite easy to execute. If this game was less obsessed with fetch questing and had more streamlined base enemies, this review would be much more favorable. It’s a surface-level experience and appears to be a departure from Cococucumber’s previous two titles’ prowess that put them on the radars of many gamers. Here’s hoping the studio can get back on track ahead of its upcoming title Echo Generation.

A PC review copy of Ravenlok was provided by Cococucumber for this review.

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Ravenlok

24.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Solid Art Design
• Nice Environments

Cons

• Simplistic, Tiring Combat
• Nothing but Fetch Quests
• No Map/Sense of Direction