Ritual of Raven - Switch Review
"A cute, sweet, characterful farming sim with a novel twist"
The farming sim genre is one well-suited to the Nintendo Switch family, and it is no surprise to see new ones regularly added to its vast library. Sometimes though, you get one that does something unique—like a farming sim where you don't actually do the farming yourself but instead programme an army of magical constructs. This game is Ritual of Raven, a new story-based cosy farming sim from Spellgarden Games—let's see how it delivers this enticing premise…
The Good
Ritual of Raven starts by thrusting your character into a strange little world of magic called Leynia. Sucked through one of its malfunctioning portals, you are (with entertainingly little context) selected to become a witch's apprentice and taught how to do magic via farming and farming via magic. Soon you have a sarcastic and inexperienced raven familiar at your side and are in town meeting a colourful cast of characters—like anthropomorphic hedgehogs, busybody ghosts and a stranded alien (you get the idea)—all of whom you need to help and befriend, as is typical of these games. As you might be able to tell from what you’ve just read, Ritual of Raven’s art style is bright and pixel-y, encapsulating you in a charming land to immerse yourself in.
I knew very quickly it was not going to be possible to get through this review without using the words ‘Stardew’ or ‘Valley’. Ritual of Raven clearly draws quite a bit of inspiration from what is still the gold standard of ‘cosy farming in a slightly odd community’ games and hits many of the similar beats—farm and collect resources, get to know the locals, fill up buildings with collections, etc. This is in no way a bad thing (there’s a reason everyone loves Stardew Valley), but it’s the new additions and twists that make Ritual of Raven interesting.
Firstly, farming. For vague magical reasons, you cannot farm crops and flowers with your hands in this world. This means you need to use plant-pot-shaped magic automatons to do your work for you, and your job as the new magic user in town is to ‘enchant’ them. ‘Enchanting’ is actually programming; using command cards (‘harvest’, ‘water’, etc.), your constructs will do all the legwork—you just need to programme them, activate them, and collect the results. What starts out fairly basic soon gets into more elaborate areas as you unlock options like loops, conditions and timers, and before you know it, you’ll have a fully automated farm and mine you won’t have to touch. It's a fun and new way of handling farming gameplay, letting you spend your time elsewhere. If you are logic/programming-minded, you’ll have plenty to play with here.
Secondly, there is a very clear story and objective to follow than in the more open-ended style of farming sim. Solving people’s problems and finding the missing portal keepers (so you can save the world and get home) usually requires you to complete some magic rituals with ingredients that (wouldn’t you know it) require things you can farm. This gives you a clear guide and purpose in what to farm and when to farm—some plants change by phase of the moon, something you also control with your witchy ways—and why to farm. The story itself is sweet-moving-into-saccharine, focusing on family and community, but it fits with the game’s style.
TL;DR
- Enchanting/programming is a fun, novel twist on farming
- Charming and engaging story and writing
- Cutesy pixel style works well
The Bad
To quote an earlier paragraph of this review, the farming mechanic is ‘a fun and new way of handling farming gameplay, letting you spend your time elsewhere.’ The issue with this is that ‘elsewhere’. There isn’t a ton of other stuff to do in this land, and what there is can quickly feel like monotonous busywork. Wild plants you don’t farm can be harvested manually, pieces of recipes can be found scattered around, and you can decorate a bit, but there’s not too much else.
Most of the story progression is of the ‘bring this person a specific thing’ variety, so there’s a lot of back and forth and waiting for things to grow. More than once I immediately ended a day as soon as it started, simply trying to speed things along with little incentive to do anything else, as my farm took care of itself.
Also worth noting: my review copy had some framerate stutters on the Switch—nothing major, but with a relatively simple game and area to run, it was a slight surprise to see it struggling.
TL;DR
- Limited gameplay elements outside of farming
- Occasional performance issues
Final Score: 7/10
Ritual of Raven is a cute, sweet, characterful farming sim with a novel twist on the traditional farming mechanics of the genre. Outside of the story and developing and optimising your farm, there is limited depth to the rest of the game, but it’s still enough to make this something fans of the genre should take a look at.
Thank you for checking out our Ritual of Raven Switch review, thank you to Team17 for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
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