The Raven - Legacy of a Master Thief

I played and beat this game back when I had it on Xbox 360 a few years ago and, boy, it is exactly like I remember it. Both the good and bad stuff alike.

The game itself is amazing story-wise. The voice acting is pretty good and the gameplay and puzzles are simplistic but just hard enough to feel like a bit of a challenge. The graphics on the other hand, did not age well at all. It's one of those games where as a kid I thought the graphics were pretty good and looking at them now, they have a certain charm to them, but they are definitely not great by any means.

The main pitfall of this game is the bugs. This game is so unpolished, it can actually impair the experience of playing and it's extremely infuriating when it does. I managed to get softlocked 2 or 3 times throughout my playthrough purely because some dialogue bugged and wouldn't give me the item I needed, or an interactable object overlapped another interactable object and then I couldn't interact with the one I needed anymore. Restarting the level always seemed to fix the issue, but it still feels like it's something they could have and should have fixed.
And there are a lot of graphical bugs that ruin the immersion. Like massive clipping textures or a character replaying an animation before moving onto the next. This one isn't a game breaking thing and I'm more or less nitpicking, but like I said it breaks the immersion and ruins a lot of what are supposed to be intense moments in the story.

Personally, despite the numerous bugs and lack of polish, I still really like this game and I would recommend it for anyone who is willing to deal with some jank. The story is still really good and the twists and turns are well done, so if you like story driven point-and-click adventure games, this is for you.

Point-and-Click adventures are back. It’s no longer a resurgence, and games like Broken Age prove it. There is an appetite among gamers, new and old, to meet interesting characters, discover fantastic locations, and solve plenty of puzzles. With that said, let us look at The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief. Inspired by the classic works of Agatha Christie, The Raven is a mystery game set in Europe during the 1960s. KING Art Games (of Battle Worlds: Kronos fame) have created a game with plenty of atmosphere as well as numerous puzzles and locations to explore. With point-and-click adventure games now back as more than a niche genre, does The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief steal the show, or should it be put away for good?

Let’s begin by saying this game gets a lot right. The story is right up there with the mid-century mystery classics we’ve come to respect. A master thief named “The Raven” has been dead for 4 years after being shot during a heist. In London, 1964, a jewel disappears from a museum (because of course it does), and the hunt begins anew. The opening cut-scene and the score that plays throughout the entire game is wonderful. Many console games such as the Uncharted and Mass Effect series have really delivered soundtracks that I find myself listening to while I’m out and about, and I think The Raven’s may soon join them. The score fits perfectly with it’s mysterious vibe really gelling with the sneaky characters and lush environments. While we’re on the topic, let’s talk more about the game’s environments. While interacting with them can often be a little difficult, there is no denying their beauty. They are designed with great attention to detail and, when working with the game’s brilliant score, create an impressive atmosphere. The characters have, for the most part, their own motivations and seem to know more than they are letting on. While the character models and animation are, to be honest, something that looks straight out of 2004, the backdrop created by the music and environments can often make-up for some of the game’s other issues.

While I may have been first impressed by the game’s music, story, and atmosphere, the feeling didn’t last long. The character animation in this game is, to put it lightly, awkward. Mouth movements are almost puppet like and characters move much too quickly to be realistic in any way shape or form. I don’t just mean that they walk too quickly but that even their arm movements seem out of sync with their weird muppet-face movements. Not only is this strange, but most of the voice acting is quite sub-par. While the story itself and main lines are pretty decent, side characters are often poorly saddled with terrible animation and even worse voice acting. Sounds pretty bad, eh? Well, as bad as it is, the high-quality music and environments can often make up for this. The main character is quite endearing, as are many of the re-occurring characters. All I can say is, talk with who you need to as quickly as possible and finish their related puzzles so you get to advance through the game.

The puzzles are another negative aspect of the game. While some are pretty impressive, most are forgettable or repetitive. Like many of the characters you’ll meet, the only ones that are interesting at all are those that are directly related to specific plot elements. Sadly, these are more rare than they should be. Moreover, you first take the role of Constable Anton Jakob Zellner, someone who could be great at solving puzzles. Perhaps the developers tried to emulate this by creating a mechanic which can often force you too look at items multiple times to notice certain things about them. This creates two problems: firstly, most of the puzzles are glorified fetch quests for people you’ll never see in the game again and have no bearing on the plot. The second issue is that, while the multiple-click mechanic seems interesting and could work for a game like this or even Wolf Among Us, it just means you have to click on items multiple times to reach the conclusion that you’ve already found in your head. Any adventure game needs great puzzles to work, and more often than not, The Raven does not deliver in this case.

While The Raven certainly has its high points, it’s mostly a muddled mess. The music, story, and environments all work well together to deliver an amazing atmosphere, one like I’ve found in few other games. Unfortunately, interacting and working your way around this atmosphere can often be anything but fun. It’s a shame really, I would love to give this game a higher score but as it stands The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief gets 3 out of 5 stars. Some great moments can be found in here, but it just feels like too much of a hassle to find them. If you’re a big Agatha Christie fan, this might be something you want to check out, but otherwise, it is a tough sell. There are currently more than enough high-quality adventure games being released right now to settle for anything less than great.

Really, really close to being a great game. And weirdly, it's that 'game' part that gets in the way.

The Raven is an Agatha Christie-style mystery - no surprise there, since original publisher The Adventure Company have also made three games that are straight adaptions of Christie's novels - that centres around a legendary thief, the detective that brought him to justice, and includes a drizzling of light murder along the way. The tropes it nods to - the games starts aboard the Orient Express, for instance, and the nature of the jewels being stolen allow the plot to stretch out in archaeology - make the influence fairly obvious, and the character of Lady Westmacott (named after one of Christie's aliases) is obviously meant to be Christie herself. It all plays out like an official adaption that they failed to get the license for.

No problem with that, of course, as long as it's a well constructed story with interesting characters - and that it certainly is. You're introduced quite quickly to a central cast of around 8 characters, with one minor character that later rises to prominence and another added into the picture later, and all of them have hidden depths and intrigue about them. (If you're wondering who to suspect of having done something during the game, here's a pro-tip: all of them. They're all bastards.) They mostly avoid falling into stereotypes - how many games see you controlling an elderly, overweight Swiss man without a single obviously useful power beyond being sensible? - and even those characters that do fit into neat boxes at first eventually branch out from them, with the Baroness and the doctor both opening up about their families and what they experienced during World War II at points. The way that the plot weaves around these characters, making them all vital cogs to aid its flow, can easily leave a writer in danger of failing to truly explore each in turn and explain their motivations, but that doesn't happen here. It has an aversion to melodrama that's rare for the genre and allows for some surprisingly subtle moments, too; the revelation that the Doctor used to be a member of the Nazi party is unaccompanied by the typical overblown handwringing you'd expect from a plot point that invokes that theme, and even leaves you feeling a certain kind of sympathy with him. (As it happens, that 'spoiler' barely even warrants spoiler tags, though I'll leave them there as it's a pretty effective piece of dialogue.)

The attention to detail extends beyond the plot and the characters, too; the game is set in 1964 and is always aware of that fact. Sometimes it's silly, such as the moment when Zellner, the aforementioned Swiss detective, expresses amazement at a video camera in a 'the marvels of modern technology!' moment, but sometimes it adds a great deal to the game in few words - a newspaper article you can read towards the start of the game has an article on John Surtees. Granted, I had to look him up, and it's not even relevant to anything else in the game, but when I got the reference I was suitably impressed. It's the kind of immersive touch a lot of games set in a specific time past don't go for, and is the match of many of the similar moments in L.A. Noire, which is probably the high-watermark for that kind of knowing historical accuracy among the games I've played.

It's a shame, then, that the great plot, setting, and characters are let down by the gameplay. It's simply just a little too slow-paced for its own good, and quite fiddly to control at times - a screen with a lot of points of interest can become quickly confusing until you realize that the right analogue stick only toggles through them in a left-to-right menu fashion. The instinct, of course, is to point that stick at the item itself as though you're moving a cursor, and even by the end of the game this particular control mechanism can occasionally trip you up. The characters also never run when you're controlling them, and you can't force them to either - not only does this become frustrating at times when you know exactly what you need to get to and it's three screens away, but it feels totally at odds with some of the more high-octane moments of the plot. Honestly Zellner, I know time is catching up with you, but if everybody is about to die of suffocation, couldn't you at least break into a light jog once in a while?

At least, in a clean break from '90s tradition, the puzzles are mostly clear and logical, and broadly speaking, easy to solve with a little thought. You don't often find yourself blindly combining items in the environment in hope, save for the odd fixation with chewing gum as a useful tool that occasionally appears; the game even occasionally lightly scolds you for attempting something that won't work for an obvious reason, which is a luxury it's afforded by the sensible nature of its puzzles. It's likely the easiest point-and-click game I've ever played, although as long as it avoids being insulting, easiness is never a bad thing in these circumstances. Sure, the ending that ties everything in the story together verges on the ridiculous, and I saw at least part of it coming, but at least it's not so totally ridiculous that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

There are those who will feel that the basic gameplay interface is everything, and The Raven would do nothing but frustrate them; it's not going to be much fun for anybody that wants fast-paced action or a constantly twisting plot that makes your head spin either, so you'd have to be honest and say that it doesn't escape the trappings of its genre. All that said, if you're a fan of point-and-click adventures and the compromises that typically come with them, and don't have a PC that's fit for gaming, The Raven offers a lot to enjoy and ranks as one of the better ones in its console generation.