Ritual of Raven Review
Magical farming game Ritual of Raven meshes a cozy farm sim with gratifying automation.
Ritual of Raven. Credit: Spellgarden Games / Team17
Story-based farming sim Ritual of Raven from Spellgarden Games and Team17 upends the traditional formula. Instead of manually managing the day-to-day of your farm, you enchant magical robots—Arcana Constructs—to handle all the agricultural work through card-based programming, combining farming with automation game mechanics.
After your customized character falls through a mysterious portal into the land of Leynia, you meet Sage, a witch desperately searching for her missing familiar, Flufferstoop. She quickly takes you on as an apprentice to help her close the portals, which are dropping unwitting visitors into Leynia more and more frequently. She leaves your life just as suddenly, just after pairing you with your own familiar, Raven, vanishing into a portal in search of Flufferstoop. Now it’s up to you to stabilize the chaotic portals. You farm for the herbs that power your magic while befriending the locals to help your cause.
Ritual of Raven. Credit: Spellgarden Games / Team17
The story unfolds through interactions with the interesting, quirky outcasts that inhabit Leynia, each with rich backstories that reveal themselves as you build friendships and complete quests that move the plot forward. The characters are far more compelling than the surface plot of the portal crisis; their portrayals made me feel a deep sympathy for them as the writing convincingly conveys authentic emotions. Touching personal stories of villagers grappling with their own relationships and struggles are what make the narrative stand out.
Ritual of Raven. Credit: Spellgarden Games / Team17
The farming automation system is where Ritual of Raven really sets itself apart from its genre contemporaries. Due to convenient story reasons, you can't actually touch the crops yourself, as doing so would damage their magical properties. Instead, you program pot-like Arcana Constructs using tarot cards that make them move, water, harvest, check for specific conditions before acting, and more. The system allows you to create complex logical chains that make the constructs travel between various marked areas, doing varied tasks. You might program a construct to plant seeds only if it's harvested fewer than ten of that plant type that day, for example. Designing the perfect, most efficient programs that reduce your need to intervene becomes genuinely fulfilling. The optimization is fun. Apart from farming or mining, you use the cards in automation puzzles you complete to earn new constructs; these do an excellent job teaching how to use new cards, gradually introducing complexity without overwhelming you.
Ritual of Raven. Credit: Spellgarden Games / Team17
The card programming system works well conceptually, though it has some limitations imposed by oversights in the game’s UI design. The cards are large, making it unwieldy to work on longer, more complex programs, as their size doesn’t allow you to see enough of them at a time. There's also no quick way to duplicate sets of cards on the fly, forcing you to copy them one at a time, which gets irritating quickly.
I loved the game’s complete lack of time pressure. There’s no penalty for letting days pass by, and you only need to move as quickly as you'd like to complete story-advancing quests. The day-night cycle doesn't even matter for crop growth since you can use magic to simulate a day passing for any plant as part of your construct automation. Additionally, making money is trivially easy, eliminating any need for grinding that might wear you out in other games. The game’s helpful Book of Shadows—your pause menu spellbook—serves as an almanac that specifies every detail of each plant's growth cycle and necessary conditions, eliminating any guesswork.
Visually, Ritual of Raven distinguishes itself with colorful isometric art that diverges from the typical top-down 2D pixel art of most other indie farming games. While the art still looks somewhat flat, I appreciate the effort to do something different. Some more use of shadow would have helped the art pop a little more with added depth.
Ritual of Raven succeeds by genuinely innovating in familiar genres. The combination of cozy farming with the satisfying programming logic of automation creates something that feels new despite the familiarity of both game styles. There’s plenty to do in this game, and it’s well worth checking out for fans of cozy games.
Ritual of Raven is available now on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Overall Score: 8/10
Played on: Steam Deck
