Murder, mystery, plot twists, and surprises. And a splash of action (well, not really). The Raven Remastered is a remastered version of the original point-and-click murder mystery detective game, The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief, developed by King Art Games and published by THQ Nordic. The game consists of three chapters, during each of which you control a different character (for the most part; sometimes it switches up). The first chapter and a half consist mainly of playing Anton Jakob Zellner, a constable of the Swiss police, tasked with protecting the Eye of the Sphinx, a rare gem, from being stolen by the Raven while on its way to be displayed in Cairo, Egypt. The Eye was meant to be displayed with its twin, but the first one was stolen from a museum in London by a new Raven, who had reemerged from having thought to be killed by the hand of the legendary Inspector Legrand. As a result, Zellner was hired to guard the train from Switzerland to Venice. The story takes place in 1964.
I’ll start off by saying that I have not played the original version, so I’m not sure what the difference is between the original and the remaster, but nonetheless, the original was from 2013, and the remaster came out 2018, with the Switch version finally coming out in 2019. It’s kind of strange that a game was remastered from only 5 years ago at the time, and for what is just a point-and-click story game, which should remain timeless.
While good, it is somewhat antiquated in style and seems kind of like a prototypical version of what Telltale Games had already perfected. Those of you who aren’t familiar with Telltale, they made very similar point-and-click games, with branching dialog and choices that “mattered.” I put quotes because the endings usually remained exactly the same regardless of choice, but it still affected dialog and how characters would interact with you. The Raven does not incorporate any of these elements, however, and as a result, it makes it feel like you don’t really have any control. Maybe I’m just spoiled. That’s not to say that the story wasn’t great, but I’ll get to that later.
First, let’s go over the game-wise elements of The Raven Remastered. I’ll start off by saying that this game is a flaming pile of glitchiness. I’m honestly surprised I was able to even finish the game through without encountering a game-breaking bug or getting stuck.
The lighting is glitchy in places, the game lags in some places (like on the cruise ship at the back or on the forecastle), and the game has to load scenes way too often. It’s running on a modern system; it should be able to render, for example, the entire ship without having to load every time you go to one tiny section. Coupled with my bootleg microSD card being extremely slow, the constant loading made it almost unbearable.
The animations are also very awkward and uncanny-looking. Especially the talking, because they just repeat the same movement over and over, like a bad anime. The models of the characters themselves aren’t that bad, and the drawings were okay; however. It almost reminds me of a game from 2002, which is why it honestly surprised me that the original game was in fact from 2013. It’s kind of unacceptable for a relatively modern game. Then again, this game was probably low budget and they didn’t have the resources to make properly keyed animations. But that’s what the remaster is for, is it not?
Another really annoying aspect was how slow and clunky the character movement is. When you’re controlling the first character, Anton Jakob Zellner, considering that he’s an older man who looks to be in his 60’s, you’ll notice that he walks abhorrently slow, and walking around at this slow pace coupled with all the really clunky movement, dim lighting at parts, excessive loading, and awkward inventory controls almost made me want to skip this game. Thankfully, it gets somewhat better once you get to play as the more youthful characters, considering that they walk a bit faster.
Speaking of controls, funnily enough, it took me almost two-thirds of the game to notice that you could press the minus button on the controller to open up a journal with character descriptions and entries about what you’ve seen and done so far. It just wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the game. Clarity was not a strong suit of this game, evidently. It would have also been great to have touch screen controls (or even just the simple d-pad!) rather than having to solely rely on the left control stick.
Another slight nuisance was how for some elements in the scene, you have to examine it several times to “fully” examine it. It kind of forces you to have to keep spam clicking A in order to make sure you get every single detail you can out of the object, and sometimes it may cause you miss things or repeat unnecessary dialog, which breaks immersion. I wish it would just do the full examination in one try.
I also thought it was strange how the journal is seemingly shared between all the characters. Like, you would open it up when you’re playing characters #2 and #3, and it would still show entries from Zellner. It made no sense from a story point of view, because they clearly refer to their “notes” through the game. On a side note, I thought it was slightly amusing that the characters would think with an internal monologue, but their mouths would move as though they were speaking. Like, for example, you’d examine the violinist and Zellner would literally talk to himself out loud about how rude he is and somehow he wouldn’t hear. Stuff like that broke the immersion for me.
But the gameplay wasn’t all that bad. I actually had fun going through and talking to all the characters and finding out what they were like, and the dialog was good and believable. The voice acting surprisingly decent, and it was good enough that it was believable and not cheesy like it is in a lot of voice acted video games. The logical puzzles and mini games and investigating that you encountered from going through the story were also well thought-out and gratifying. There were a few of them like the bullet matching and lock picking that were a little too pixel perfect, but otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if I had to look at a walkthrough a couple of times.
The music was really beautiful and perfectly fit the theme of the game, and even though the loops were relatively short, I never got sick of it. It was great. I had the theme song stuck in my head the entire time playing through.
Most of what made me not rate this game super low was the story. Being a narrative-based game, it’s hard to explicitly talk about the story without spoilers, but I’ll try my best to omit any. I’m by no means an expert on the detective genre, and to be honest, the only real detective work that I’ve read was A Study in Scarlet (the first Sherlock Holmes book) and, like, watched The Pink Panther movies, so my taste may not be that refined and some of the things in this game may actually be cliché or overdone. Regardless, the story was actually really thrilling and gripping. As you go through the game and talk to the characters and learn more and more about them, you really start to connect with them in a way that makes you actually care about each and every one, despite there being so many. Most of the prominent characters are very three-dimensional, and even the more minor characters aren’t left out in playing an integral role in the story. Few works are capable of doing this. I actually wanted to go everywhere and talk to all the characters and go through the dialog. Some people might find this dreadfully boring, though, because there is a lot of dialog and the characters speak rather slowly. If you want action, I’d stay away from this game.
The plot twists are great, too, and though maybe I should have seen them coming from a mile away, they all got me. The only thing was that it was as though the plot twists didn’t have any subtle hints dropped throughout; it kind of feels as though they just… happen without much foreshadowing or laying the pipes. Maybe I wasn’t being as perspective as I should have been.
I thought it was also cool how you change to the point of view of two of the criminals working behind the scenes while Zellner is carrying on his investigations, because you get to see things as they REALLY happened, and I thought that was cool and gave the story a lot more depth, because there is a sort of moral gray area that gets explored with them. The plot twist in the end, however, totally came as a surprise and it was honestly kind of strange and wasn’t really supported by most of the story that took place beforehand. It was almost as though it was kind of slapped on at the end, but, I mean, it did make some sense if you connect the dots. I just wish there was some more cohesion.
All in all, this was a 9/10 in terms of story, and a 3/10 in gameplay. That averages out to 7/10 since, being a story-based game, it’s not fair to put as much as an emphasis on gameplay when it is essentially an interactive movie. It may not be worth the $20 price tag, but you can always snag it on Steam when it’s on sale to play on PC instead of getting the Switch version. Unless you really value portability. I do hope that this game gets a proper sequel some day that does the story justice and further fleshes out the characters with all the kinks ironed out so that I can rate it 10/10.
Check Out The Raven Remastered Nintendo Switch Gameplay Trailer:
The Raven Remastered is available for Nintendo Switch digitally and in retail stores.
Nintendo Switch Review
Video games are my passion. I've played countless games for 15+ years on various different consoles ranging many genres. Favorites are action/adventure and RPG's just because they're so immersive and I love being able to lay out a strategy for going down tech trees and looking for loot, but I'll pretty much play anything that isn't a sports game.
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