Great story elements that never really cohere, excellent body and eye animation held back by an absence of facial animation and a controller input model that made me want to eat my own fist. Nonetheless - worth a play for the narrative twists and turns...!

The Raven presents an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, but with about twice as many twists. There's some solid character writing on top of some very broad archetypes - they have distinct voices but... none of them are especially interesting or surprising.

The primary hook is solid (only an over-the-hill policeman can stop a legendary thief from stealing two famous gems travelling to a museum in Cairo) - and it's fun to see the pudgy Constable Zellner bravely rise to the challenge. There's turns and twists, reveals and reversals by the bucketload and...

...honestly, it's frustrating to report that I rarely felt involved in the story or invested in the characters. I always felt kept at a distance, which I'm going to put down to the control scheme, the frozen deathmasks of the character's faces, the mostly linear puzzle chains and the emphasis on establishing shots and full wide shots.

Playing the game with controllers (Sony Duelsense and 8BitDo SN30 Pro) is often an exercise in frustration - character movement is animation-driven (as you would see in Man of Medan or Uncharted or most triple A third person games), but with insufficient animation states to react responsively to the player's input. Hence turning around is a chore, and navigating the environment (filled, it seems, with squared-off orthagonal obstacles) is like trying to maneuver an oil-tanker through the canals of Venice. The ability to run (even if a little tonally askew) would have been very welcome - but with these controls would have only magnified the frustration. Perhaps a map or shortcut to different visited locations would have improved the experience?

Dialogue and cutscenes are well-acted for the most part, with some excellent body language, dramatic actions and lots of bespoke animation. The characters are well-modelled, with vivid facial designs... that mostly remain utterly rigid. It feels unfair to critique an indie game for not having top-notch facial expressions, especially when the original release was in 2013 (one year after Telltale's Walking Dead Season 1), but faces of this quality that remain resolutely frozen outside of cutscenes takes me right out of the experience. Oddly, however, there's some great eye-acting - eye rolls, side eye, distracted wandering glances galore. My only guess is that somebody on the dev team felt there needed to be some correction for the lack of facial animation and this was the cheapest, fastest solution. I do appreciate the attempt, but for my money it doesn't do enough to alleviate the hours of glassy stares.

The Raven tries to deliver a mostly cinematic experience - and so exploration and parallel puzzle chains are strictly curtailed. I guess this should have ensured that my focus was on the characters and the main action, but I really like exploring locations - even in adventure games! - so instead this had the effect in reducing my investment in the location. The game also has the tendency to close off investigative avenues without warning when you trigger a dramatic event. I can understand the dramatic reasoning behind doing this, but it can really put a dampner on exploration. Puzzle chains seem linear, but can be surprisingly involved but do a poor job of supporting in-game research. This combined with the poorly implemented system for finding interactive objects can lead to more than a few moments of apparent moon logic.

For the character animation and exploration, I can't help but compare The Raven to another of my favourite games, The Last Express. The first chapter of The Raven has some cursory similarities to Jordan Mechner's masterpiece, but The Raven's characters feel bland and superficial by comparison, with none of the life the rotoscoped FMV lends to the passengers of The Last Express. Equally, The Last Express invites the player to roam the halls and rooms of the Express, embedding the environment in the player's mind as a real location that you care about. The Raven does do some VERY cool stuff with the Express as a location, but you really feel as though you're being constantly chaperoned - again, always kept at a distance.

My last complaints lie with the fixed multicam - normally a highlight for me! However, due to budgetary constraints or a fear of disorientating the player, the developers have mostly restricted gameplay angles to bland establishing shots and full-wide shots, with few of the cowboy angles or closeups seen in something like Resident Evil Remake that invite the player to emphathise with the main character. There can be a compelling cinematographic argument for keeping the audience at a distance in some visual storytelling, but I don't see it here - rarely are we invited to take the side of Zellner or other player characters during gameplay. It seems a shame.

Still - that's a pretty twisty-turny plot you got there, Mr. Raven - a real rarity in adventure games and RPGs, and almost non-existent outside of those genres. The twists are earned, within the bounds of the Saturday-evening mystery dramas that The Raven clearly seeks to emulate (like, don't expect everything to be totally airtight, not even reality is totally airtight!). You might find the characters a little difficult to warm-up to, but if you're the kind of person to value an intricate little who-and-how-dunnit, The Raven will see you right.