GRAVEN Review

A lot of people talk about that moment when a game made their eyes widen – for people of my generation Metroid is often cited as being responsible for that moment. Instead of going right like most side scrollers the player instead went left. Simply going left told the player that all bets were off.

For me Metroid didn’t have that effect, but I do remember the first time I played Hexen. At the moment of playing, I had already dismissed it as a DOOM clone with magic. I completed the first level and instead of just progressing as normal, there was a loading screen, and it became clear that I could back track at any time and was even expected to. My sixteen-year-old self was not ready for hub worlds in a first-person shooter. I wasn’t even ready to call them first-person-shooters.

GRAVEN feels like a direct call back to those games. A first person-shooter set in a fantastical world, with the visuals also harkening back to the Hexen.

You take on the role of a priest that has been exiled to a strange swamp. Given a staff and magic tome, the priest is tasked with helping the locals deal with a monstrous threat. Doing so means descending into dungeons, fighting creatures and solving puzzles.

The art style is 90s retro, while making it clear that this is something that benefits from modern technology. The art has a heavily granular polygonal style, but at the same time there is a wider, richer colour palette, and more involved lighting effects. It is well suited to the mood GRAVEN is trying to evoke.

A lot of people might try and associate GRAVEN with the boomer-shooter revival. It has the look, its title is all in caps, and the movement through levels (a term I call under-cranking) is breakneck paced – as if the character has rockets instead of feet.

However, that is as far as the comparisons go because GRAVEN is interested in slowing down the game beats for dialogue and story. The opening crawl on the boat is a good example of this with a bunch of narrative exposition. Likewise, the level layout is not a series of linear levels, there are main hubs that link to dungeons with the player returning to explore, purchase items and deliver more of the plot. The DNA of Hexen is more than superficial here, and I think it really works.

The encounters are cool and fast paced, flitting between melee combat and spell firing can still be frenetic, with the player required to think on their feet. This is enhanced by the excellent level design. There are impressive arenas for combat, claustrophobic tunnels with enemies lurking in hidden pockets, and good vertical areas with the player needing to prioritise ranged threats. On top of the combat areas there are plenty of nooks and crannies to poke in and exploration of a level is almost always rewarded.

The later skills and spells unlocked add new dimensions to the combat, more tactics are required with the more bullet-spongey enemies, and these two things go hand in hand to create a difficulty curve that is both challenging and satisfying.  

I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about GRAVEN, maybe I could have done with less story and more spell flinging? Maybe some of the puzzles hewed a little too confusing in later levels?

Regardless, I think that this is great exploration of an older genre of FPS without going full on DOOM.

Conclusion

GRAVEN is a lovely little taste of retro shooters that fall outside what we considered to be the standard of the time. An excellent fusion of melee, magic and puzzle solving.