Earn your peace by ridding evil
GRAVEN is an action-adventure video game wherein you must battle a plague in search of justice. Developed by Slipgate Ironworks, this first-person puzzler RPG has you playing as an exiled priest, who must now fight back against unholy creatures in order to dispel a deadly plague. It’s considered the spiritual successor to Hexen II, a 1997 cult-classic FPS, and features open-ended regions and multiplayer modes.
Walk the parallel path
The story of GRAVEN revolves around a faithful priest of the Orthogonal order, who ended up being wrongly convicted and exiled. Playing as this character, you are sent to a strange swamp and given only a mysterious staff and book and vague instructions on what to do next to survive. You will have to face terrifying monsters while helping out poor commoners who are being victimized by heretics and purging the land of evil.
The game features the iconic ‘90s aesthetic on 3D graphics, making it look like a nostalgic title with its pixel art environmental textures. The combat system itself is also reminiscent of old-school FPS games, giving you a variety of over 30 upgradeable weapons and spells to fight enemy NPCs. You will need to constantly move about in order to avoid getting hit, as you’ll normally encounter groups of them—and killing them gets real bloody.
This world highly encourages exploration, however, as most areas offer puzzles and hidden quests that lead to more rewards. Nearly everything in the game can be interacted with and even destroyed through different means so solving your way through doesn’t have to be linear. This is all the more true when it comes to the 4-player online and local multiplayer modes. Don’t expect the game to hand-hold you when it comes to quest progression, though.
Don’t lose your way now
Overall, GRAVEN looks and feels like an old-school game but definitely uses more modern gameplay systems to help make things more immersive. While you may have a hard time figuring out what to do next in quests, the open-world exploration gives you a chance of discovering it all on your own—which makes it a more enjoyable achievement. Plus, getting to play with others in this dark medieval world is always a blast for fans of ‘90s RPGs.
