REVIEW – Graven (there’s that all-caps nonsense again, when will it stop?) is not for beginners, hence the dilettante reference in the title, but still understandable considering the difficulty of the game, so this first-person perspective adventure is not for everyone.Even though Slipgate Ironworks’ title is relatively short, you can easily spend two or three times the time required for a playthrough in Graven.

Action, mystery, and a chance for redemption await you in the gritty first-person action adventure GRAVEN. Explore a dark fantasy world as a wrongfully convicted man of faith.Use weapons, magic, and the environment to battle the horrors of humanity, the wilderness, and beyond.

Powerlessness

There is no waste in the game.There won’t be a lot of resources, and they need to be allocated carefully, and battles need to be approached strategically. Consequently, the entry level is not so easy to pass, but one has to wonder if there is a demand for this game.Once the difficulty is overcome, it can be fun, but not everyone is up for the experience of trudging through the land of the dead in search of the slightest hope. If you don’t learn how to use magic properly in the meantime, you may find yourself in a lot of trouble. The game is intentionally difficult. We can rarely heal ourselves, while there’s never a shortage of enemies, so it’s no exaggeration to say that one mistake can mean death. Unfortunately, there’s no map, so you don’t even feel like you have the saddle for the piñata. The story is that the priest loses his daughter, then hears that she might have survived, so he travels to a small town full of undead. The rest you can find in the notes dropped here and there, but the story doesn’t weigh much and can be forgotten. The other characters are not memorable either.

They tell us which way to go and that’s it. As for the gameplay, it’s already been mentioned that it’s first-person, and in addition to killing, there’s also resource gathering and puzzle solving. As the player progresses through the story, the enemies become more formidable, and the arsenal is expanded to include fire and lightning (because magic was mentioned for a reason), not to mention explosive barrels or environmental obstacles that need to be exploited. Maybe that’s where the game wants to be strong, where it wants to bring our creativity back from the brink. It wants to be different from too many games (the Nacon guy wasn’t wrong when he said that recently).You have to assess the terrain and the possibilities, because your toolbox is running out (you can’t even grind your resources…), and if you waste the opportunity, you can start again.And again. And again. And again.But if you persevere, the game will reward you.

Lack of hope

Graven openly states that fighting opponents is not a reliable way to acquire resources. That’s why the game is hard to play. You don’t get back the potions that replenish your health. We lose money when we die (and this happens more and more often because the enemies hurt us pretty badly).We can quickly find ourselves in a dead end that is either completely impossible to get out of or requires a level of perfection that we have a one in a million chance of achieving.The gameplay is fundamentally fair but unforgiving, and on easier levels it can be too easy to go overboard (the game becomes far too easy, possibly), but there’s not much to be thankful for either.

Again, the lack of a map must be pointed out: there should at least be one, so that there is at least some indication of where not to try and where not to go.But there isn’t one, and it’s even more frustrating as we waste more and more time trying to find out where to go, while trying to survive the conflicts ahead of us.Thus, a 5-6 hour playthrough can easily go over 20 hours, and that requires a lot of patience and nerves of steel, which not everyone has. The sound effects are minimal (especially the squealing of the enemies) and the graphics are average, and there’s not much more to say about that. What you get is an RPG where you get stepped on, and although you can defeat your opponents in a variety of ways, you have to figure out how and how to do it in the environment without going overboard.

Hopelessness

Graven gets a six and a half out of ten. No more, because the lack of a map knocks it down from the seven out of ten it would have otherwise earned. It’s good that it tries to get players to brainstorm and stand out from the crowd, but it’s all too easy to get into a hopeless situation, which can degrade the game itself to a lesser degree. For this reason, it is a fair game, but nothing more, and there is little point in bothering with it.It will be gone within months, forgotten by everyone, period.That may be an overly harsh way of putting it, but it’s not a product that’s here to stay.

-V-

Publisher: 3D Realms, Fulqrum Publishing

Developer: Slipgate Ironworks

Style: Introspective RPG

Release: January 23, 2024.