Ravenswatch Year One Edition

The store page sells you fallen fairy-tale heroes making a last stand against a Nightmare that has eaten their world, and I assumed the folklore was decoration on a standard arena roguelike. Half of that is right. This is an isometric action roguelike from Passtech Games, the studio behind Curse of the Dead Gods, and it moves the way you would expect: dash, dodge, dump cooldowns, grab loot, level up, repeat. What the marketing undersells is the clock. Every run is split into chapters, each a fixed stretch of day and night that ticks down whether or not you are doing anything useful, and when it runs out a boss shows up regardless of how underleveled you are. That one design choice reshapes the entire game. So the real loop is not combat, it is triage. You drop onto an open map dotted with events, elite camps, side objectives and chests, and you have to decide what you can actually reach before nightfall. Nights make everything more dangerous and more rewarding, which turns the back half of each cycle into a running argument with yourself about how greedy to be. While that is happening you are assembling a hero. Each character has a compact kit of abilities plus an ultimate, and every level-up offers a choice of talents that modify those abilities, sometimes hard enough that two runs with the same hero barely resemble each other. Magical objects found out in the world stack on top. Scarlet, the Little Red Riding Hood one, flips into a werewolf after dark and effectively becomes a second character depending on the time of day, which is the clearest example of how much thought went into the roster. Beowulf is a blunt brawler, the Snow Queen locks down crowds, the Pied Piper drags a swarm along behind him. There is real range and no obvious correct pick. Co-op is where it comes alive and also where it gets messy. Up to four players online, no couch option, and enemy health scales with the party, so a full squad is not easy mode. When it clicks it is genuinely great: someone freezes a pack, someone else detonates it, the timer pushes you to split up and cover more ground, and you regroup at the boss with wildly different builds. When it does not click, the screen becomes a light show. Four sets of particle effects layered over a boss's telegraphs makes attacks hard to read, and a full lobby of underleveled players against a chapter boss is a long, grinding slog nobody enjoys. Solo is tighter and far more legible, but it also strips out the safety net that makes the clock feel survivable. The complaints are real and they cluster in the same spot. The time pressure is excellent in theory and stressful in a way not everyone signed up for. If your ideal roguelike lets you clear a map and take stock, this will irritate you constantly. Chapter maps recycle layouts and events faster than the run length justifies, so a long session starts to feel same-y in the middle. Hero balance is uneven, with a few characters snowballing hard and a couple needing favorable drops to function once the difficulty climbs. And that climb past the default setting gets steep quickly, which is where a lot of the negative sentiment lives: people who bounce off tend to bounce at that wall, not in the first hour. The Year One Edition packaging is what it sounds like, the game plus the content added across its first year, so you are at least playing the fuller version rather than the build people spent early access arguing about. Who is it for? Players who liked Hades but wanted more room to move and a co-op button, or anyone who found Curse of the Dead Gods too rigid and wants that studio's combat in a looser shape. If you have three friends who will reliably show up, bump whatever score you had in mind. If you play roguelikes alone, mostly for the meta-progression grind, there is less of that scaffolding here than genre habit expects, and the clock will keep hurrying you along. I would rather have a roguelike with one strong opinion than five soft ones, and the day-night timer is a very strong opinion.

Alex · Scout Team

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