Ritual Of Raven Review

There’s something oddly relaxing about the gameplay loop of farming and life simulators. Although real life tends to involve problems that can’t be fixed by something as simple as growing herbs and running errands for your neighbours, games in these genres turn many of life’s headaches into something that’s relaxing to pursue, with none of the stress or backbreaking physical labour that goes into actually running a farm. Ritual of Raven is the latest game to attempt to carve out a space for itself in this niche, albeit this time with a witchy twist.

Ritual of Raven starts when you get sucked into a mysterious portal that brings you to Leynia, a land where magic is reality. Upon your arrival, you’re met by a witch, Sage, who takes you on as her apprentice to try and stabilise the portals. There’s a quick tutorial in which Sage explains the basics of witch magic before she jumps into an unstable portal to try and track down her lost familiar, leaving you a little more stranded than before.

Thus begins your journey to stabilise the portals in Leynia and find a way to return to the world you came from. It’s not a complicated premise, but there’s enough substance to give the story a distinct personality, and the result is a feel-good tale about magic, friendship, and being kind to one another. While the quests often boil down to collecting items and giving them to the right person, the game offers a reasonable amount of variety and the experience, for the most part, doesn’t end up feeling overly repetitive as you go about your work. There’s also a diverse cast of characters who bring your adventure to life; some of them are original residents of Leynia, while others have been brought from their own worlds, but all have unique personalities that shine through in the expressive and humorous writing. It’s genuinely delightful to get to know each of the game’s eccentric individuals and help them to overcome the challenges that they face, whether in life, in magic, or both.

The game’s cast of diverse characters helps to create an engaging and compelling story.

As a witchy take on the classic farming simulator, Ritual of Raven attempts to set itself apart by offering a twist on the genre’s standard mechanics. As Sage explains in the tutorial, the magic contained in the plants you grow for your spells is destroyed by handling, so plants must be farmed and harvested with the help of magical machines. Using enchantment cards, you program these constructs to do your farmwork, which in theory is meant to automate a lot of the busywork out from the gameplay and allow you to focus on more meaningful tasks.

In practice, while it is helpful to have your constructs churning out plants indefinitely, it can be a little tedious to set up and configure these automations to be as useful as they can be. Every action that your construct performs, such as planting, watering, and harvesting, must be programmed in your enchantments, and this takes time, even with the efficiencies of custom templates and control flow elements. The enchantment UI is also not great on the Switch; it’s very slow to move cards around using the button and joystick controls, and although you can use the touchscreen to drag and drop, this is inconsistently sensitive and a little buggy. This makes it easy to make mistakes, which are all the more annoying for the lack of an undo button. There are also moments toward the end of the game where, if you have finished most of the game’s side quests, there’s a lot of downtime while waiting for your constructs to finish their tasks. This effectively creates a wait when there might not otherwise have been one, and leaves the automation sometimes feeling as though it takes more time than it might have saved compared to doing things by hand.

The enchantment UI allows you to program your constructs, but it’s not seamless to navigate on the Switch

As for the game’s side content, this includes friendship quests, where you help your neighbours with individual problems, museum quests, which involve collecting objects and donating them to the village museums, and completing ‘spell jars’, which have a variety of effects. There’s a solid amount of material to keep you busy here, and with the exception of the last few hours of the experience as mentioned above, I usually felt as though I had some kind of side quest to work on if there was a delay on a main quest objective. While a few additional quality of life elements such as the ability to rearrange the contents of the museums would have been welcome, for the most part the side quests are a great addition to the game and help to round out the experience.

One criticism here, though, relates to the friendship quests. To trigger each friendship quest, you must give your neighbour specific items that match a silhouette hint, however some of these items are remarkably hard to find. For example, posters might appear on walls, but there is so much detail in some of the environments that they can blend in and be hard to spot. Similarly, while you can fish items out of portals in the fishing mini-game, different portals will produce different sets of items, and some portal spawns have a very low probability, so it can be hard to know where you should be focusing your search for items you’re not familiar with. Due to the friendship quests’ sequential nature, it is frustrating to know from the silhouette hints that you have two of the three items required for a certain character’s full questline, only to be unable to start the quest sequence entirely due to not having found the first object yet. The game doesn’t give you clues for where to find these items, either, so if you can’t locate them yourself, you’re effectively locked out of this content until you can.

Help your neighbours by finding the items they need

Another notable downside in the game is that it gets glitchier the further you get into the experience. While some of these bugs are harmless and a little fun, such as an out-of-bounds glitch that lets you run around in the sky in the Cloud Realm, others are simply annoying, such as the time I got stuck in a corner and had to wait out the entire day until the game automagically sent me back to the witch’s cottage at 2AM. Enchantments for the magical constructs get buggy as you increase the number of cards involved in your programs, sometimes characters disappear entirely, and on a couple of occasions I totally lost the ability to interact with characters and objects until the next day started. I suspect at least some of these issues might have stemmed from having too many constructs running concurrently, but if this is related, these bugs may not be easily avoided given the game’s heavy emphasis on automation to handle the repetitive tasks of witchy life.

On the other hand, the game’s visual design is certainly stunning. Character designs are gorgeous and varied, complementing the game’s vibrant, colourful, and detailed environments which offer a distinct atmosphere for each region of the map. Although some of the spaces you visit are quite large and initially may feel somewhat empty, the game allows you to decorate the world as you see fit and there’s a lot of room for creativity. The isometric perspective does restrict some design options as you can only position decorations facing forward-right or forward-left, but even with these limitations, it’s easy to create spaces that look beautiful with the wide variety of decorations on offer. For your player character, there is also a decent number of inclusive character customisation options such as hijabs, textured hair, and different voices, all of which can be updated at any time by interacting with the mirror in your cottage.

While there isn’t a huge variety in the music, the soundtrack is serene, and the music is accompanied by nature sound effects such as bird calls and insect noises. The result is a cosy and relaxing atmosphere that’s easy to sink many hours into. The one exception to this for me is the sound of the constructs when they are attempting to perform an invalid action such as sowing seeds on a tile that already contains a plant; the weird warbling distress noise they make when this occurs really got under my skin, but it does at least function as a way to identify when a construct needs their enchantment reviewed or something in their inventory has run out.

Final Thoughts

Although Ritual of Raven has its issues in both gameplay design and in its technical elements, it nevertheless offers a fun and relaxing farming sim experience. With its charming narrative, a dynamic cast of characters, and gorgeous environments to explore, the game is a solid pick for anyone after a little bit of magic in their life.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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