Ravenlok

The fact that the new action adventure Ravenlock is built for a younger audience is obvious right from the start. With its charming design and fairytale-like layout, it's easy to see how children and adolescents can be enchanted, and together with the minimal challenge, it becomes even more clear that developer Cococucumber intends to entertain without any demand for a challenge. Even for the older folks, though, there's a nice treat here, and if light-hearted fairy tales are your thing, chances are Ravenlok will appeal to you.

You take on the role of a little girl (who you get to name yourself) and after a short prologue, you travel to a magical land ruled by an evil queen. If the premise is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, it's because the game shares a lot of design thinking and layout with the immortal classic. There's a healthy mix of crazy environments, tea parties with rabbits and card-playing humans, and it really manages to hammer home the feeling of being in a magical kingdom where anything is possible.

The brilliant design, and especially the stunning graphics, of course, enhances the experience to its utmost, and just like with the studio's previous titles (Echo Generation, Riverbond), it's a blocky voxel look that breathes both simplicity and finesse. The levels themselves are indeed rather small and simplistic in their design, but this in turn opens up for more detailed work where both foregrounds and backgrounds are allowed to come to life.

Gameplay-wise, Ravenlok mixes a leaner version of point-and-click adventure with outright hack 'n' slash action, and you'll alternate between searching for unique items and hammering the attack button like there's no tomorrow. The challenge is almost non-existent, and when it comes to both puzzles and battles, you will face the easiest possible opposition. You will indeed take on a lot of bosses and upgrade your arsenal with new attacks, but overall, it's really enough to hit the X button frantically to achieve success, and since you also automatically pause the game every time you consume health portions or throw projections, you rarely have to think fast or master difficult finger balances.

If the challenge in Ravenlok is of the easier kind, you match it with a playing time that doesn't demand too much from you either. I would say that it takes between three and four hours to reach the end credits, and by then you have most likely picked up a majority, if not all, of the game's so-called achievements. If you're younger and more unfamiliar with games in general, you can of course squeeze out an additional hour or two, but for what you want to convey with your linear saga, the game length, structure and presentation fits almost perfectly in this smaller format.

The music deserves some extra praise as it offers some nice tones during the journey. A couple of melody loops are eerily catchy and overall the soundtrack keeps a very high level. However, it is a bit of a shame that the overall soundscape is not of the same quality. For example, the characters are not refined with their own voices and your sword strikes sound more like wet socks being thrown against a bed frame than sharpened steel hitting its target. It's nothing that will affect playability in any way, of course, but when you paint such a nice fairy tale world to explore, it would have been nice to have a more vivid soundscape to take part in.

In the end, however, Ravenlok is a short, but highly enjoyable adventure to spend time with, and if you have children, this can be a great title to discover together. The challenge is minimal, but the atmosphere is great, and even if there are some flaws in the presentation, the short playing time ensures that the bad never overshadows the positive. This is also a great addition to the Xbox Game Pass. If you want to throw yourself into Wonderland once again, Ravenlok is well worth your time with its charming craziness and ingenious madness.