GRAVEN

I went into GRAVEN genuinely hopeful. A wrongly convicted priest of the Orthogonal order, exiled to a plague-choked swampland called Cruxfirth and handed a staff plus a book of spells, is exactly the kind of grimdark setup I want to spend a weekend with. The visual mood is legitimately great: low-poly medieval rot, eldritch horrors shuffling through murky water, funeral pyres drifting past on rafts before you even reach dry ground. Slipgate Ironworks clearly knows how to dress a stage. The tragedy is that once the curtain comes up, the play keeps losing its script. At its mechanical core, GRAVEN is a first-person action game that wants to be Hexen and Heretic's spiritual heir, which is an honourable ambition. You start with a knotted staff, pick up a crossbow, a sword, a wrist-mounted bolt launcher, and eventually a spellbook or two. Spells are largely environmental tools rather than combat nukes: you freeze rivers to walk across them, spread fire to burn barricades, charge machinery to open doors. That puzzle-locked environmental magic is actually one of the game's better ideas, and when you use a fire spell to clear a webbed corridor and then pivot to your crossbow for the undead waiting on the other side, it briefly clicks into something satisfying. The three expansive regions give the world some scope, the looping level structure rewards backtracking with new routes, and there are secrets tucked into corners that made me genuinely happy to find them. Up to four-player online co-op and split-screen are on offer too, which sounds fun on paper. Here is where the RPG fan in me starts tapping the table impatiently. The writing does not hold up its end of the bargain. You get vague text-note lore, one-line NPCs in the hub town, and a storyline that amounts to "plague bad, cultists responsible, go hit them." For a game that bills itself as part action-RPG, the role-playing layer is basically non-existent. No branching conversations, no choices that feed back into the world, no reason to re-examine the lore notes the way you would in a game where the writing earns that attention. The backstory of the exiled Orthogonal priest is genuinely compelling on paper and the game squanders it almost immediately. The combat struggles almost as much as the narrative. Melee hitboxes are inconsistent enough that you will swing your sword through an enemy and register nothing, and the stamina bar that governs running, jumping, and attacking is one of the most punishing design choices in recent boomer-shooter memory. Jumping drains it fast, and the recharge is slow, so exploration becomes a cycle of sprinting, stopping, waiting, and grumbling. There is no manual save system worthy of the name: quit mid-session and you respawn at the hub, then trudge back through re-spawned enemies to where you were. Game-breaking soft locks were reported throughout the review period, and several critics hit puzzle bugs in Act 2 that required reloading or outright gave up. The item hotbar forces you to juggle weapon slots that eat proportional inventory space, so you end up defaulting to two or three weapons rather than experimenting with the full arsenal. That is a shame, because the arsenal itself has some personality. GRAVEN is the kind of game that made me sad rather than angry. The atmosphere is worth something real, the environmental magic puzzle design shows genuine craft, and any fan of Hexen who sees that opening boat sequence will feel something. But three years in Early Access produced a 1.0 that still reads as unfinished in its save design, its narrative ambition, and its moment-to-moment combat feel. Retro-FPS devotees with high tolerance for jank and zero reliance on narrative payoff will find pockets of genuine fun here. Everyone else will find the vibe writing cheques the mechanics cannot cash. Monika, Scout Team