Ravenlok (Xbox Series X)
When Alice stepped through the looking glass in C.S. Lewis’s stories, she found a strange and wonderful land filled with delightfully odd characters. While Alice’s adventures were mostly about moving from one weird sight to another in a world of whimsy, it was part of an effort to entertain young readers rather than an effort to build a rich narrative. Ravenlok seems to be quite the fan of this mindset, it presenting its own world with cues taken from Wonderland’s characters to design an action game friendly to young players and more about seeing what’s next than diving deep into a story or the gameplay’s mechanics.
This particular story begins when a young girl you name yourself moves with her family to her great aunt’s farm after she passed away. Locked away in the barn is an old mirror your heroine stumbles across, it pulling her in and dropping her in a fantasy land that mixes recognizable iconography from the Alice stories with new ideas. Fittingly, one of the first characters she encounters is a rabbit, and due to her raven black hair, she is believed to be the prophesied Ravenlok who is meant to free the land from the evil butterfly woman Queen Dreda. With a sword and shield in hand, Ravenlok explores the land to find the relics needed to unlock the castle gates, many large creatures standing in her way but just as many friendly allies willing to guide her or aid her in whatever ways they can.
The world of Ravenlok doesn’t feel like it’s simply trying to adapt any of Alice’s adventures, often leaning more towards aesthetic inspiration than transplanting any familiar faces in its world. Queen Dreda evokes the Red Queen and has guards with armor made of cards, but then there’s a segment of the game where you fight a fluorescent blue bison who had been feuding with a group of stags. A mad hatter rabbit asks you to collect tea cups for his tea party, but Thorlaron the Hydra that emerges out of a giant teacup is certainly a different direction than the less dangerous adventures of Alice. In the same way modern works lightly borrow elements of ancient mythology, Ravenlok feels like it reinterprets what it borrows while still creating new ideas that interest it. One segment features a theater where you must trick a panda guard to get inside so you can save soot bunnies from being worked to death by large hammer-swinging robots that just so happen to be named Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and oftentimes part of the fun is ending up in a wholly invented situation only to see the little ways it links back to the books that somewhat inspired Ravenlok.
A bit of an oddness can emerge from the game’s chosen art style though. When it comes to backgrounds and structures, Ravenlok can construct some beautiful areas where the lighting often draws out the colors of the scenery rather nicely. When you get closer to things like mushrooms or fences though, you’ll start to notice the telltale blocky look of voxels, and that isn’t necessarily a problem at all. Where things end up stranger is when the voxel construction is used rather flagrantly. A character with an otherwise fairly smooth design might have a blocky head for no clear reason, and sometimes the textures are applied to faces with a deliberate attempt at being a little low fidelity. While this could be some attempt at being surreal (although even before you enter the looking glass you’ll see it on the normal farm), the characters embracing it to different degrees makes it hard to see the intent behind it. The first boss you face, the Weeping Fungi, is a large mushroom creature that does not use any of the lower quality rendering techniques or design approaches, but then the friendly witch Enid you just met a few minutes before that fight is flagrantly built entirely from voxels. Ravenlok’s art style doesn’t necessarily suffer from this odd mishmash, many interesting monster designs make for striking boss characters and the environments are often lovely, but you’ll every now and then have characters like the large cat Nestor who seem like they’re from another game entirely.
Your work as Ravenlok will most often involve making good use of your sword in battle, and perhaps to appeal to a wide ranger of players, your basic attack is remarkably simple. You hammer the attack button as fast as you like and Ravenlok will swing her sword in front of her rapidly and without ever getting weary, meaning when you want to hurt an enemy, you often just walk up and start waving the blade around as fast as you can. The enemy will of course try to get in their own blows, usually with a bit of a clue they’re about to attack so you can raise your shield if you like. There is a small delay in pulling it up by holding the button down and there is stamina tied to it, Ravenlok needing time to recover her wits if she blocked a blow that was too strong for her. However, you also have the freedom to run around most battle arenas and a dash that works like a dodge, meaning many times flight is the better option than holding your ground and guarding. While a good deal of the action that isn’t immediately wrapped up by your swift attacks can involve just running away and then finding your opening to flail at the enemy for a bit, you are given a few more options so a fight doesn’t feel totally mindless. You can open your item menu which will freeze the action, this allowing you to quickly heal with potions that aren’t too hard to come by or utilize bombs that will instantly hit and can even inflict effects like the self-explanatory Poison Bomb. Bombs aren’t too useful in bigger battles so they don’t break the combat balance, but they also feel almost too small to be worthwhile to use.
What does prove more useful in preventing the action from being too basic though are a few skills you earn over the course of the adventure. Ravenlok will eventually unlock powers like launching a wave of projectiles that home in on nearby enemies or a charge attack that can push through crowds of little foes. While the game does take a while to muster up strong opposition, when you start fighting things like the Anglerfish Plants they do actually start to press in and require more situational awareness to avoid being dogpiled. With only four unique abilities and cooldowns before they can be used again though, you’re often doing pretty straightforward attack cycling, using them when they’re available and if the foe is actually a bit tough, possibly keeping your distance until they’re available again. Ravenlok doesn’t generally lay out overly difficult battles, but there is often enough to a boss’s tricks to make facing a new one interesting. Some light side activities also give you things to work towards, finding hidden figurines in the world, collecting coins and feathers from battle to increase your strength or buy more resources, and solving a few simple puzzles all working to keep you from losing interest despite the game not laying out too many real challenges for an experienced gamer. Ravenlok also has the good sense to move at a fast clip, the game taking a few hours to complete so you’re often moving along to some new situation and able to bask in it just long enough to appreciate it before it’s on to the next area.
THE VERDICT: Ravenlok’s sword-flailing combat and ability cycling don’t make for the most exciting battles to participate, but interesting boss designs and beautiful small areas make it pretty easy to see this short adventure through. Definitely meant for less experienced players because of the relative simplicity, there is still enough interactivity to keep you involved and willing to continue on to the next whimsical area or huge monster fight.
And so, I give Ravenlok for Xbox Series X…
An OKAY rating. Ravenlok kind of feels like it’s meant to ease inexperienced gamers into the kind of more demanding action they can one day find in the likes of Dark Souls, but it also maybe peeled back the complexity a bit too much and lost some of the satisfaction along the way. The rapid sword swinging feels a little too loose and its strength must be lower to accommodate how rapidly the swings come out. Dodging and guarding are definitely useful tools in a boss fight, but the dash feels a little bit too easy to just mash to escape while the shield instead feels too committal. Abilities are so useful you can end up leaning on them a lot, which is good in that it ups your otherwise lean battle options but also leads possibly to overreliance whereas the bombs feel like they could have been a more useful tool if they were limited well but actually impactful. Trying to pare down an action game into something that a new video game player could easily adjust to is no easy task and you could just as easily lose them by making decisions that make the game more enjoyable for those who do understand it, but more tinkering could have been done to make the combat satisfying on top of accessible. Thankfully, a good deal of Ravenlok has your attention turned elsewhere as you head to strange new places, maybe unlock some hats for your heroine, and interact with locals or do quick quests to help them.
Ravenlok doesn’t do anything exceptional save maybe its art style turning out rather nice despite its oddities, so Ravenlok ends up being a fine enough game to play if you have it but not one you’ll likely seek out. I feel even a young or inexperienced gamer might rather plunge into a Zelda title to cut their teeth on action games, but it feels like Ravenlok is a bit faithful to the Alice stories in another way. It’s here mostly just to provide a fun and delightful experience for its target audience, so while there are richer and more robust experiences, this game aims to be short, sweet, and simple.