Ritual of Raven is a cozy, witchy, surprisingly narrative-driven game that plays on the farming simulator genre with a unique twist. Developed by Spellgarden Games, it has charm, heart, and a good dose of automation. If you’re looking for an adventure centred on nature and magic, then strap in — but the spell it casts might not be super effective on you.

You play as a human who is transported to a magical land through a haywire portal. You find yourself in the town of Nevar, populated by magical animal folk. Taken in by a local witch, you begin to learn the ways of magic — before she disappears through a portal of her own in search of her missing familiar. It’s up to you and your familiar, a clearly out-of-their-depth raven, to figure out how to get her back.

The cozy farm sim is a well-worn genre at this point. What makes Ritual of Raven stand out is the fact that you don’t —or more specifically, can’t— do any of the farming yourself. Touching the crops with your hands removes the magic from them, meaning you’ve got to rely on your Constructs for help. These are cute little robots that you can program step-by-step instructions for using cards that you collect or buy throughout the world.

You start with just basic instructions available move around, till the ground, plant seeds and water. Before long, though, you’re unlocking options like loops, allowing you to execute a set of commands many times; fields, allowing you to execute commands over a set area; and magically increasing the growth stage of a plant. Within a couple of hours, you can have an almost fully automated farming setup right outside your front door, turning seeds into fully grown crops and even more seeds while you run around.

When this concept works, the game really shines. It’s a marriage of the farming sim genre with programming-based logic puzzle games like Human Resource Machine. It’s clunky at times, especially if you’re playing on a controller, but it’s surprisingly well featured and allows you to almost immediately break the economy of the game. There are more focused logic puzzles to solve as well. In order to unlock new Constructs, you need to find them out in the world and complete a puzzle with only some of the cards available. These were never particularly challenging, but they encourage you to structure your solutions in different ways and explore more of the tools you have available to you.

Beyond the farming mechanics, there are a few more core elements at play. You can control the phase of the moon each day, and certain crops will only grow into different variants in certain moon cycles. But this never feels meaningful, since you’re essentially in control of how quickly your crops grow and can easily just change the moon phase and go to bed. There’s also Portal Fishing, where you can yoink items from other dimensions through a claw machine-esque minigame.

Trouble in town

Ritual of Raven is far more concerned with you playing through the main quests than with building out your farm. These play out mainly as a series of fetch quests and long dialogue sequences, as you travel to different locations trying to rebuild a team of Portal Keepers who can help rescue your missing mentor and her familiar. The town of Nevar has a lot of charm to it, but it never felt like a place I wanted to explore. The town’s residents acclimatise to your arrival incredibly quickly, and everyone speaks to you as if they’ve known you for years. Even when other characters arrive through the portals, they all speak to you with a level of familiarity that doesn’t match the situation.

The end result is a world that feels frictionless in a frustrating way — none of the conflicts feel meaningful, and none of the relationships that you build feel earned. While there’s value in representing a world built on respect and understanding, Ritual of Raven’s storyline feels emotionally muted by how easy it is to resolve any problem. This was a huge barrier to me wanting to invest time into the world and main quests.

There are also a tonne of jokes in this game, and while some of them are fantastic, they tend to come too thick and fast to be enjoyable. There are conversations where it feels like every single line of dialogue is trying to be a joke, and that gets exhausting after a while. It makes the characters feel two-dimensional and lacking substance.

That’s not to say that there isn’t something to enjoy here, though. The world is colourful and vibrant, and the different areas you travel to have a lot of variety. But given the fact that Ritual of Raven is constantly pulling you through its main storyline instead of encouraging you to build and explore at your own pace, the story and the characters become the main focus of the experience. If it doesn’t connect with you, it’s going to really drag down your enjoyment of this game.