Title: Ritual of Raven
Developer: Spellgarden Games
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: August 7th, 2025
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam
Price: $14.99 (USD)

Ritual of Raven advertises itself as a “story-based farming simulator” and then has to gall to introduce one of the coolest gameplay mechanics I have ever seen. This is unfortunate because the automated farming system is a true stroke of genius game design, but the bulk of the game is very much oriented towards fetch quest story missions. Mind you the story is lovely, genuinely emotional and quite touching. But it feels like such a missed opportunity to introduce such an incredible gameplay mechanic, and not focus on it. As a result, while I enjoyed my time with Ritual of Raven, I can’t say I truly loved it.

Review

Ritual of Raven describes itself as a “story-based game with farming”, and it is indeed very story-forward. In this case, you play as a university student working on a master’s degree, who was randomly summoned out of their world and into a parallel world where magic is real. Specifically, you are summoned by a witch named Sage who shows you the ropes before disappearing herself. It seems as though the only way to get home is to open a grand portal, which requires the help of four master witches. Unfortunately for you, it seems that Sage was not well-liked, and each of these sages is upset and jaded due to turmoil caused by Sage. In order to get the help you need to return to your world, you will first have to help fix a lot of the damage that Sage has wrought, both physical and emotional.

The story is a soft tale about helping heal hurt people, and it was one that frequently tugged at my heart strings. There are a number of major storylines tied to the quest to open the portal home, and the central characters the plot revolves around are well-written. For example, Pip, the first great witch you will help, is the former apprentice of Sage and is suffering from immensely low self-esteem after feeling rejected by her. The player helps Pip regain her confidence and build a new magic staff. Pip’s depression feels believable, and her journey to regain her self-esteem is ultimately one she herself undergoes, albeit with prompting from the player. I found all the storylines to be roughly equivalent to Pip’s story, meaning a well-written game across the board.

Presentation

What greatly aids in conveying the soft sentimentality of the story, is the lovely art chosen by Spellgarden Games.

Ritual of Raven is conveyed via a painterly aesthetic, where everything is made up of solid colours, and everything lacks borders as the colours flow into one another. It is tremendously vivid, and it ultimately feels as though the game has stepped out of the pages of an illustrated children’s storybook.

The characters are portrayed in a similar manner, with simplified character designs that use chunky blotches of colour, and features such as mouths are conveyed often with a mere handful of pixels, or in the case of eyeballs, a single pixel. This feels very cute, and the uncomplicated designs allow the colourful palette to take center stage.

The music is likewise lovely, and I found it to thread a successful line between whimsey and grounded earnesty. Whether you are exploring a land of pink crystals, making a dated internet reference, or serving as the confidant for a character’s true feelings, it feels as though the music is flexible to serve these different emotions simultaneously.

The strongest aspect of Ritual of Raven’s presentation is how these various aspects come together to aid in portraying a specific vibe, and one that the game does a remarkable job of conveying. To play Ritual of Raven is to feel a sense of melancholic wonder. How lovely this game is to experience, went a long ways towards making up for some of the gameplay disappointments I felt. I truly look forward to seeing what other worlds and experiences this team can craft in the future.

Gameplay

The hook for Ritual of Raven was strong for me. A farming game, but instead of doing the farming yourself, you use automated robots to do the farming for you! This is tremendously up my alley, and I was keen to experience it. Unfortunately by the time I rolled credits, I felt like this incredibly clever mechanic had mostly taken a backseat, and I was left feeling unsatisfied.

The farming itself is nothing short of incredible. Instead of farming yourself, you are given the aid of adorable magical constructs. The hook of the game is that these constructs can be  given commands such as planting a seed, watering a crop, or harvesting a crop, in the tile in front of it. This can then be expanded out using conditionals such as the ability to say “water all crops in field 9” or “harvest all crops in field 10”.. An additional layer of complexity is added when you are given the ability to functionally add if/or/when conditionals, and you quickly grow to realize that what you are doing is programming these robots using programming logic. 

This is the piece of information that unlocks the magic of Ritual of Raven. While initially you may have had to issue 16 different commands in order to have a construct perform the tasks you desire, eventually, you unlock a conditional that allows you to simply loop through the command 16 times, allowing you to drastically simplify your code, and before you realize it, you are learning programming logic. 

It is such an gorgeous system, and it was one that I was absolutely impressed with. I genuinely had a great time. Simply optimizing my command sequences to get the constructs to farm as efficiently as possible in as few commands as necessary was an absolute joy, and I have never encountered a game based around programming logic that does it with such joviality and genuinely, it is truly an impressive gameplay system. 

It is a shame then, that’s such a beautiful system takes a backseat to the true gameplay of Ritual of Raven, which is fetch quests and talking to NPCs. 

That brings me to my biggest issue with Ritual of Raven, which is how little the game actually makes you interact with its beautiful farming system. The purpose of Ritual of Raven is to seek the aid of various powerful witches in pursuit of the ability to open a gate which will allow you to go home. This is mostly accomplished by talking to people and running fetch quest errands. The first storyline has almost no farming in it, the overwhelming bulk of the experience is running to talk to one character, then running to talk to another, maybe stopping to pick some flowers or herbs to bring to another, and then finally at the end there is a tiny bit of farming that is required of you. But the vast majority of the experience is simply running from point A to point B and listening to people talk. 

I will say things get significantly better towards the back quarter of the game where you are tasked with growing a significant amount of crops, including things like cross breeding new species. However, even then, it really didn’t amount to more than a couple hours of farming, in my experience, unless you totally neglected your farm beforehand. 

For the vast majority of the experience, Ritual of Raven feels like more of a visual novel as opposed to a farming game. And that’s not to say it is a bad one, I want to reiterate that I found the story very lovely and quite touching. It was not so miserable to go from point A to point B and talk to these characters, because they had compelling personalities and story lines. I did enjoy going through Ritual of Raven’s story. I just also found it bitterly disappointing that fetch quests and simply running from NPC to NPC took such a heavy focus, considering how great the farming was. I almost think that if the farming system wasn’t so dang cool, I probably would have enjoyed Ritual of Raven significantly more.

Final Score

That isn’t to say that Ritual of Raven is a bad game, much to the contrary, I think it is lovely. It looks and sounds splendid, like a children’s fairy tale come to life. It is full of charming and well-written characters who tell stories that are equal parts funny, heartening, and sad. It has an incredible central farming mechanic, along with some programming puzzles that can be solved on the side for extra constructs.

Ritual of Raven is a lovely game. I just wish it was more tailored towards the farming. It seems like a crying shame to invent such a creative system only to have it take a back seat. But that’s just my tastes, I can very much see instances in which somebody doesn’t enjoy the programming logic-based farming, and instead enjoys the game’s focus on NPC interaction and light puzzle solving. It also isn’t like I can say I felt mislead, since they advertise it as a “story-based farming game.” All I can say is that because of how the game’s focus was allocated, Ritual of Raven is not as spectacular an experienced as I feel it could have been. But if the developers ever make a follow-up game that experiments with this this logic-based farming system as a more central focus, I will absolutely be there. Day one.

Ritual of Raven’s farming is incredible, I just wish there was more of it.

Featured Image: Spellgarden Games