It’s not often that I sit down to write a review and struggle to put words on the page, but The Raven Remastered has been such a rollercoaster of frustration that I almost didn’t know where to start. How do you review a game whose first eight hours result in you questioning the life choices that led you to play it, but whose last three are satisfying enough that you play them all in one sitting? If I can say anything about The Raven Remastered, it’s that it certainly took me for a ride.

Developer: KING Art

Publisher: THQ Nordic

11 Hours Played // Review Copy Provided // $29.99

The Raven Remastered opens like a feature film: a dramatic sequence and a narrative hook have you asking all of the glorious, meaty whodunnit questions, while a gorgeous orchestral soundtrack sets the mood. A thief known only as the Raven has stolen a priceless jewel just before its historic exhibition in Egypt. You, the mild-mannered Constable Zellner, get caught up in the mystery when you find yourself on the same train as a second priceless gem. Of course, it’s up to you to get to the bottom of the mystery and catch the thief.

Gameplay-wise, The Raven Remastered is pretty straightforward. You collect clues from the environment, converse with NPCs, and interact with items to progress through the story. As you travel from Switzerland to Egypt, your journal fills with notes and observations which you can return to at any time. If it sounds familiar, it’s because The Raven Remastered is structurally similar to a point-and-click adventure.

It’s simple enough, but the seams start to show within minutes of playing.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

One of the most notable issues with The Raven Remastered is that it is a very clunky experience, not least because of how it feels to navigate physical space in the game. Normally, this wouldn’t be too much of an issue for the genre. However, in The Raven Remastered it’s so problematic as to overshadow anything positive about the gameplay. Your character moves slowly and awkwardly, and constantly gets stuck on invisible object boundaries. Similarly, while the game uses dramatic camera angles to increase visual interest, it fails to consider how these might influence the player’s movement through space. I often would enter a new space and find myself immediately heading back the way I had come from, because what was “up” in one space was “down” in the next; holding the joystick in place would essentially reverse my movement. These issues were distractingly, frustratingly bad, and distractingly, frustratingly constant.

Similarly awkward and disappointing is the assortment of door-unlocking challenges interspersed throughout the game. These don’t come with clear instructions and while some are straightforward, some are the opposite of intuitive. It’s always concerning when solving a puzzle brings relief rather than satisfaction, and the puzzles in The Raven Remastered offer significant frustration with little payoff.

The answer to this puzzle was simple; implementing it was anything but.

To be clear, I might have been able to look past the game’s user-unfriendliness had the story caught my attention. Unfortunately, however, The Raven Remastered fell short here for the most part as well. Your character, Constable Zellner, is a bit of a blank slate, the friendly everyman who is just working things out as he goes. There are a few plot twists which aren’t all that exciting, and I struggled to care about the one-dimensional characters. Accompanied by the awful controls, frustrating challenges, and a host of lesser grievances that would take an entire paragraph to list, the game was shaping up to be my least favourite in months.

After playing the game for eight hours, I was honestly ready to give up. I was actually relieved when a certain character was shot, as I couldn’t see how the story could possibly progress without them. You can therefore imagine my enormous disappointment when the game started again from a different character’s perspective. Oh god, no. I may or may not have sworn aloud at this point and put the game down for a breather. I simply couldn’t face playing through it again.

But we know that this is not how the story ends; I played the next three hours in a single go.

The Raven is in the museum!

What changed was the writing. Where the narrative in the first playthrough seemed bland and one-dimensional, the second playthrough captured my interest in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. The characters suddenly developed a depth and complexity that made me invested in their stories. The plot twists were similarly engaging, even if some didn’t make perfect sense. Likewise, where the first playthrough suffered from poor pacing, the second run was noticeably more streamlined. Despite the eternally clunky controls, I was starting to enjoy myself.

While it’s pretty much impossible for me to recommend The Raven Remastered given my experience of the first eight hours, the last three do redeem it somewhat. Where the first playthrough is dull and dreary, the second is more lively and keeps you on your toes. Nevertheless, there’s an astounding number of issues on display which overshadow anything good about the title. For a game that claims to be remastered, The Raven Remastered is surprisingly rough around the edges.

Thanks for reading! If The Raven Remastered isn’t your cup of tea, check out my personal favourite indie of 2018, The Spectrum Retreat. In the meantime, feel free to pop in to our Discord and have a chat with the staff and other like-minded Nindie fans. Finally, don’t forget to keep up with Nindie Nexus on Twitter – you can find me here.