If there has been one genre that came from nowhere and dominates the indie field, it would be the ubiquitous “roguelike”. For those not familiar with the term, the games are typically 15-30 min chunks of gameplay resulting in increasingly hard gameplay elements that are largely designed to see the player fail. The only way to win is to learn the systems very carefully, or in the vein of “roguelite”, slowly get stronger between runs. Despite how often the term roguelike is used, the majority of the genre is actually of the roguelite genre, delineated by slow levelling up between runs, getting stronger and stronger each time. Ravenswatch falls heavily in the traditional genre of very little upgrades between runs, with only the player’s skills and knowledge accruing in the battle against the darkness.
Not for the faint of heart, Ravenswatch takes conventional legends and fairy tales and gives them a dark spin. Feeling more like a Diablo experience, players will explore around a map, complete quests, level up, and try to fight a great evil, all in about 20-30 minutes per level. Travel around, fight some enemies, maybe get a few new moves, and repeat. It has some solid roots, but it’s limited in its repetition.
Ravenswatch sits in a strange place within the genre. At its root, the moves and controls are far more complex than the typical two to three buttons many of its brethren utilise. A single character like Red Riding Hood slashes, dodges, throws bombs, turns into a werewolf, and so on. There is a lot there for players to get into, but the downside is a harsher learning curve.
Like any good modern Rogue game, upon level up players are given a random set of three moves at different qualities to decide what to pick. This, of course, is where the heart of addictive elements in the genre come from, and it’s always fun deciding whether to level up a fire breathing dragon, go for poison, acquire more bombs, or other options. One of the drawbacks, though, is that the levelling is fairly slow, and often the moves aren’t packing that much “wow” factor. This leads to one of its major problems.
Ravenswatch has a strange issue where the core game is a little too complex to just jump into, given its myriad things to do on the map, sub quests, skills, and more. However, on the other side, it lacks much real depth or replayability. The maps always have the same stuff; for example, the first level has players helping a townsperson build a house, meaning go find some pickups in a mine. It’s the same quest every time, and the rewards are too great to not do, but it takes so long of the allotted time on the map, there is little else to go explore. It massively hamstrings the overall desire to play one more time.
In a similar vein, in true roguelike fashion, there is very little meta-progression between runs, often only unlocking some new potential level up bonuses to be drawn from in-game. Ironically, this often has the effect of weakening a character as it makes a run less predictable or able to get the better skills. With a bad meta-progression, this means Ravenswatch has to rely entirely on its in-run experience. As stated earlier, it starts to fall flat fairly fast. Part of the problem is that the level ups are never that wild or crazy.
As any player of Rogue games will tell you: hitting that super rare skill that suddenly does multiple levels of damage, shooting lightning bolts, or having the whole screen explode is part of what makes it fun. In Ravenswatch, even the rare moves aren’t that impressive. As a result, the whole experience feels a little like a grind – a grind that doesn’t even progress to some eventual ending or story and just serves to pull the experience down.
