The advantage of summer from a gamer's perspective is that it's quiet enough to leave you some time to complete unfinished games or try new ones. That's why it can be a good ooporunity to give an old genre like the point and click genre a chance. Thanks to the indie scene on PC, adventure games manage to survive even nowadays, as proven by titles such as Cognition to name one. In the heat of this year's summer, we've decided to give a bit of coverage to KING Art's latest game, The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief. If the name of the studio doesn't ring a bell, maybe you've heard of their previous title, The Book Of Unwritten Tales, released last year on PC only. This time around though, it's a bit different since The Raven is also coming on Xbox Live and Playstation Network sometime this summer. Until that happens, here are a bunch of videos of the PC version which came out a few days ago.
There is something charmingly dated about The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief, something which reminds of the good old adventures of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. The tribute to Agatha Christie's work is striking right from the start when the game takes you on board the Orient-Express after a nice but technically poor introduction cutscene - the problem with it being its choppy framerate and horrible compression artifacts. The characters themselves seem to come from a story of the famous novelist, starting with the main protagonist, a simple constable of the Swiss police. All this makes game's atmosphere drastically different to what we're used to in video games. The youngest amongst you will probably find it anachronistic, but those who enjoy a good detective story and who miss the old adventure games of yore might be in for a treat.
Anton Jakob Zellner is a Swiss policeman in his late fifties. He loves reading detective novels and he wants to prove himself to Inspector Nicolas Legrand. The French policeman is famous for having shot the legendary Raven but it now seems the well-known burglar is back from the dead. Did Legrand make a mistake? Is this the real Raven or is it his heir as the press claims? That's the game's plot in a nutshell, a plot that will take the characters all over the world. The first chapter of the game is set in two different places: first, inside the Orient-Express and then on a cruise ship - the question being, will there be a corpse on this one? Gameplay mechanics are totally standard for a point and click game and you'll be glad to know that none of the puzzles are too hard to solve because they rely on realistic solutions. A hint system is available if necessary, but you have to use the points you've earned during the investigation to unlock them. Also worth mentioning is the presence of optional sidequests to find out more about the title's background.
The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief is composed of three chapters so with only one available now, it is an episodic game just like Telltale's The Walking Dead. The 2 next chapters will follow shortly as chapter 2 will be released on August 27 while chapter 3 will on September 24 (PC dates only for now). The game can be found on Steam and it only costs €22.49/$22.49 at the moment. We don't know yet how much it will be on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 but it should be pretty close. If you're a fan of the old adventure games, if you've read all of Agatha Christie's novels and you enjoyed The Book of Unwritten Tales, The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief is worth checking out. The only problem we have with the game is that it is still too buggy for now and these bugs can be pretty annoying when they make progression impossible. We got stuck because an important object disappeared from our inventory and we hadn't thought of saving the game regularly enough before (don't trust the autosave system, it's broken). It's a shame because, other than that, it's quite an enjoyable experience.
Patreon
All comments (4)
Commented on 2013-07-26 18:21:01
Commented on 2013-07-26 19:33:23
Commented on 2013-07-27 00:13:58
Commented on 2013-07-27 08:53:23 In reply to moroboshi