Ritual of Raven is a story-based farming sim where you don’t do the farming yourself! Enchant Arcana Constructs to grow a magical herb garden, befriend quirky villagers and use your witchy skills to perform powerful rituals to stabilize the portals that are causing trouble for the village.
Developed by: Spellgarden Games
Played on: Steam
Length: 20 hours
A review key was provided by Team17.
In most farming simulators, the end-game is to automate your farm into a money making machine. In Ritual of Raven, the entire game is about automation. Needless to say, this is not your average farming experience.
Developed by the team behind Sticky Business, Ritual of Raven is a story-based farming simulator where you enchant Arcana Constructs to grow a magical herb garden. Using your newly gained witchy powers, gather ingredients and perform powerful rituals to stabilise the portals that brought you into this world in the first place.
Despite its farming-first marketing, I would describe Ritual of Raven as a narrative adventure game first, and a farming simulator second. While its core gameplay may involve growing magical herbs in your garden, the game doesn’t require you to grow more than what you need. There isn’t any farmland you need to upgrade, nor are you likely to run into any major issues with money. Plus, the game takes every opportunity to push you back to its main quest. After a while, you take the hint.
While it isn’t quite a farming game, it does present a unique take on farming mechanics. In Ritual of Raven, every single step of the growth cycle is broken down into individual actions. From planting seeds to harvesting flowers, every step has to be programmed and executed in the right order by your Arcana Constructs. As you can imagine, this gets complex in a hurry. Certain ingredients will require specific moon phases, growth stages, and even multiple fusions before you can get the final ingredient you need.
There’s a lot to learn, and I won’t lie, the learning curve is fairly steep. While the game does explain the basics, most of your learning will come from trial and error. This can feel tedious at the start, especially when you have to set five commands to get your Construct to water one tile. But once you get past the initial learning curve, and you collect a few more useful Tarot Cards, it is easy to enter a flow state with this game. It also helps that the game allows you to save previous sequences, so you don’t have to waste any time recreating them later.
From then on, your experience depends on how good you are at programming — or how lazy you are as a player. Ritual of Raven definitely rewards players who experiment, considering the number of “if statements” you’re able to set up in-game, but it also rewards brute force. I’ll admit I wasn’t the smartest or the most efficient player, and when I couldn’t work around the confines of the game’s programming, I was able to achieve the same outcome through brute force and patience.
Where the game runs into a major roadblock is technical polish. Besides slightly clunky UI design in some parts, I encountered a handful of technical bugs in the programming gameplay including one that stopped me from completing a main quest. Thankfully, most of them are minor enough to ignore and the developers have also been actively fixing bugs reported by their community.
Besides the joy of growing your magical garden, the rest of the game rides on the strength of its characters. There’s a surprisingly nuanced story here about conflicting ambitions and magical traditions, although the story never dips below its cozy vibes into truly distressing territories. Each character also comes with mini friendship quests that give you further insight into their backstory, while providing a nice break from the main quest.
For the completionists out there, the game presents every manner of book, library, and museum to fill with collectibles. There are also Spell Jars and Construct Puzzles littered across the map, which mainly act as a vehicle to teach you new mechanics in the game. Completing these aren’t crucial to the main quest, with the minor exception of certain side quests, but they do unlock new Constructs, pathways, and some rare furniture you can use to decorate your house.
Speaking of decorating, gamers who like customisation might be delighted to know that the game gives you free rein to decorate the entire map, both indoors and outdoors, with nearly zero restrictions on where you can place items. New decorations and plant variants also unlock as you progress the story, so you can slowly transform the entire map into your personal paradise over time.
After spending almost twenty hours in the game, split between decorating my farm and progressing its heartwarming story, I have to admit that I got more addicted to Ritual of Raven than I thought I would. Despite its technical flaws, its programming mechanics are well thought out and genuinely fun to play. It did leave me wishing the game focused more on the farming than the story, but perhaps for the studio’s next title.
Verdict: Programming Turned Cozy
From the team behind Sticky Business, Ritual of Raven is a narrative-driven farming simulator that brings you into a world of magic, friendship, and programming. Its core programming gameplay makes this more of a narrative adventure game than a pure farming sim, but there’s still plenty to love about its heartwarming story and likeable cast, even with a few technical issues that need to be fixed.
