A deck of many, many delights
Special thanks to Spellgarden Games, Team17, and Press Engine for the PC review code!
My first experience with Spellgarden Games was 2023’s Sticky Business, one of my favorite games of that year. You could create stickers. Get playful with packaging. Connect with people. I spent hours playing the game along with the DLC. The art was charming, and the game was particularly clever in telling a story about building a community and reaching people through your Etsy-esque shop.
I wrote about Ritual of Raven earlier this year in March after playing the demo for the first time, and I’ll leave what I wrote about the premise of the game below. (In the interest of keeping things as spoiler-free as possible, I’m staying away from story specifics, but I will say that the story had some interesting twists as it progressed.)
When you start the game initially, you get to create your character. You pick out colors and styles for a hat, hair, glasses, and other clothes, and finally, a name, pronouns, and a voice. Then, the game truly begins, as your character is thrown out of a portal, ending up somewhere that is decidedly NOT “on campus.” Instead, you’ve seemingly swapped places with Flufferstoop, the beloved familiar of a witch named Sage.
You’re excited that magic is real. Sage offers to teach you the ways of the magical world to send you home and get her familiar back. Of course, you’ll need to do a little farming to get some of the items you’ll need to make magic, which is where Ritual of Raven differs from other farming games. Sage introduces you to Constructs, which do manual farming labor for you.
With tarot cards, you can enchant the Constructs to do all your farming: plant seeds, water, harvest, and more. At the beginning of the demo, I wasn’t sold on this mechanic, but after spending a few hours in the game, it really grew on me. What helped it grow on me was that this wasn’t just used to plant your crops but to solve different puzzles around the nearby village to get more tarot cards to add to your repertoire.
It wasn’t something I touched on in March during my impressions article, but I loved the reason behind the Constructs. In Leynia, the magical world where you’ve found yourself, plants will lose their magical properties if tended to by non-Construct means. It was a really cool way to showcase how different this world is and how its inhabitants balance nature and magic. Some plants will even bear different crops depending on the phase of the moon, something you’ll have to pay attention to as the game goes on.
The story progresses through lots of talks with the characters who reside in the village next to your newfound homestead, and doing various quests for them. (There’s a lot of reading in Ritual of Raven.) Some characters may ask for specific plants or herbs from your garden, and others may ask you to get a Construct operating again because it stopped when Sage left. Some may even ask you to find things via portal fishing, which was a delightful claw machine mini-game that I could have played for hours on end. Each character helps you in some way or another in your quest to figure out why the portals around Leynia have gone haywire. (In addition to Bowie’s spectacular song in the game’s opening hours.)
Most games have a variation on a journal; something to help you keep tabs on quests and the like. Ritual of Raven has one of my favorites with the Book of Shadows, a grimoire that holds together your quests and other to-dos, as well as recipes, rituals, and information about the different plants and other crafting materials in the game.
There’s fantastic customization in the game, from the way you play to what you can do with your surroundings. Through the cards you obtain from exploration and puzzle solving, to the cards you can buy for your Constructs, you can be as hands-on or off with your farming as you want. And through portal fishing, visiting shops in the village, or completing quests, you can earn or buy fun things like whimsical lights or other decorations. You can truly create your own tailor-made, witchy paradise.
Not everything was great: while the controls felt great (the devs recommend playing with a controller), my framerate seemed to stutter on both PC and Steam Deck when my character would run around her farm or the village, or any of the areas I unlocked as the story progressed. Nothing game-breaking, but noticeable enough where I just found myself running less. Also, if you’re playing on the Deck, some text, especially when you’re programming your Constructs, is extremely tiny, but it runs great on the device overall.
In the end, I know Ritual of Raven won’t be a game for everyone. Even as someone who grew up on a pig farm in rural Minnesota, I don’t vibe with a lot of farming sims out there, mainly because I feel like they’re all riffing off the same one or two big farming sims. (You can probably guess which ones I’m thinking of.) Spellgarden’s pastel color palette may turn some players off, but I encourage you to look past it, because once you do, you see Raven as more than just a candy-coated farming sim. It’s a game that grew on me from the very first time I played it, and each time I mastered how to work a new Arcana card for my Constructs or made one of the villagers happy by giving them one of their favorite things, it just plain made me smile.
I came to love all those lil’ weirdos.
Surprising and delighting are two things Spellgarden has done well, and continues to do so in Ritual of Raven, earning a strong recommendation from me.
Ritual of Raven will be available on PC and Nintendo Switch on August 7th. It’ll be available on Steam for $13.49 for the first week before rising to $14.99, and on Nintendo Switch, it will initially retail for $17.99 before settling at $19.99.
Thank you for dropping by The Indie Game Cafe! To ensure you never miss out on the latest game insights and updates, subscribe now (it’s free). Know someone who will love the witchy, farming vibes of Ritual of Raven? Hit the share button, and visit my Patreon to discover even more ways you can support my work.