Ritual of Raven

My instinct when I see a farming sim is to ask one question: where does the decision-making actually live? In most of these games the answer is "in the calendar" - rush to plant before winter, sell before the festival. Ritual of Raven does something genuinely different. The Arcana Construct system hands you a deck of Tarot and Command Cards and asks you to program small magical automatons to do every step of the farm cycle for you. Plowing, seeding, watering, harvesting - each action is a card in a sequence you build yourself. At first that sounds like a thin gimmick, but the system quietly deepens as you unlock if/when conditionals and loop logic, and reviewers across the board clocked the same realization: you are writing actual programming logic inside what looks like a cozy witch game. That hook is Ritual of Raven's strongest card, and Spellgarden Games deserves credit for building lore around it too - plants in the world of Leynia lose their magical properties if touched by human hands, so the automation is not a shortcut, it is the only way. The farming itself layers in enough variables to keep the head busy. Certain crops change form depending on the moon phase, which you control by visiting the Moon Shrine. Plant fusion mechanics let you combine fully grown specimens into hybrid seeds, and crystal harvesting runs through its own separate Construct pipeline. Seals unlock scheduled automation so your farm runs without manual trigger presses, and the Book of Shadows grimoire documents every growth cycle detail so you are never left guessing at requirements. For players who enjoy building efficient systems, there is a satisfying mid-game loop of refining card sequences to cut wasted actions. One recurring criticism worth flagging: the card UI becomes unwieldy as programs grow longer, cards are large on screen and you cannot duplicate command sets on the fly, forcing one-at-a-time copying. A few reviewers also noted that the game never really pressures you to optimise - the economy is gentle enough that sloppy automation is still sufficient to finish quests - which may disappoint players hoping for a real factory-builder challenge inside the witchy wrapper. The narrative side punches above the genre average. This is closer to a story-driven adventure that uses farming as its resource layer than a pure simulation. The village of Nevar is populated by roughly twenty-plus hours worth of character quests, and the writing earns the warmth it is going for - the cast of quirky outcasts comes across as genuinely written rather than quest-dispenser NPCs. There is a lot of text, so players allergic to reading will want to know that up front. Moon-phase fishing via portal claw-machine, Construct puzzles scattered across the map, spell jar collectibles, and wide-open home and village decoration round out the side activities. Playtime sits comfortably at 20 to 30 hours for a completionist pass, which is reasonable value for the genre. Who should pass: if you came for deep farm simulation where efficient automation is mechanically rewarded and scales into something elaborate, the game does not follow through on that promise to its fullest potential. The Construct programming system could sustain a much more demanding game, and the relatively low economic stakes mean you can coast without ever mastering it. The card UI quirks - no undo on clearing commands, no preset saves, oversized card display - are genuine friction points that should have been caught before launch. There are also reports of minor technical issues depending on platform, though PC performance has been described as solid. For everyone else, and specifically for players who grew up wishing farming sims had a puzzle layer with some actual logic to chew on, this one delivers something the genre rarely attempts. Spellgarden are a small studio, this is only their second game, and the ambition here is real. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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