Ravenswatch — 遊戲評測Nine dual-form heroes carry the replay loop; only three acts and three biomes keep it a step behind the genre's best.

Some games are hard to call bad and just as hard to call flawless. Ravenswatch lives in exactly that gap.

Its pitch is written right on its face. Take a roster of figures you grew up with — Little Red Riding Hood cursed with lycanthropy, a fallen Monkey King, a Snow Queen who trades fairy-tale innocence for frostbite — and hand them to France's Passtech Games.

These characters are thrown into a world being swallowed by Nightmare. The cel-shaded linework, the high-contrast palette, the animations that snap when an ability lands: every hero stamps itself into your memory on first sight. That is the one thing rivals cannot simply copy.

But style only gets it in the door. What really determines a roguelike's staying power is its level design, its balance, and whether each run still feels different from the last. On those fronts, Ravenswatch delivers real highs, but it also leaves some glaring gaps.

The review scores already tell the story: 84 on Metacritic, a 79 Top Critic average on OpenCritic (a "Strong" rating, top 25%), and a 79% positive rating from nearly 16,000 Steam reviews. Critics nod, players buy in, and nobody puts it on a pedestal. The rest of this review is about where it earns that and where it stalls.

Familiar faces, unfamiliar darkness

Ravenswatch stakes its entire narrative ambition on one clever, economical idea: drag the world's best-known fairy-tale and mythological figures into a single dark-fantasy world that Nightmare is busy eating alive. The game draws from an absurdly wide range of sources — from the Three Little Pigs and the Arabian Nights all the way to Norse legend — so you get a Red Riding Hood caught between woman and wolf, a Sun Wukong demoted from Great Sage to a drifter forced to balance yin against yang, and a Snow Queen whose storybook purity has been turned inside out into something cold and aggressive. These are not cameos. They are the cast, and the game treats each of them as a fully reimagined character rather than a borrowed silhouette.

That collision of familiar character and unfamiliar mood is the game's first real punch. You already carry memories and feelings about these figures, and Ravenswatch deliberately resets them inside a cold, collapsing context so the familiarity curdles into unease. The tone is pushed deliberately grim, putting daylight between this game and the bright, crowd-pleasing roguelikes next to it on the storefront. It does not want to charm you. It wants the discomfort of a fairy tale peeled back to show the shadow underneath, and that authorial fingerprint is genuinely scarce in a genre this homogenized. Where most of its peers reach for whimsy, Ravenswatch reaches for dread, and it commits to that choice without blinking — which is exactly why the world lingers even when individual runs blur together afterward. The premise could have been a gimmick; the consistency of tone is what keeps it from feeling like one.

Atmosphere over arc

Here is the honest caveat: Ravenswatch delivers atmosphere far better than it delivers plot. As a roguelike built around individual runs, it neither has nor really could have the interlocking momentum of long-form linear storytelling. Each hero's backstory and motivation leak out through scattered in-run events, snatches of dialogue, and environmental detail rather than through cutscenes shoved in your face. You assemble the picture across attempts, never in one sitting, and the world reveals itself in fragments that reward attention rather than demanding it. For some players that drip-feed is its own pleasure; for others it never quite coheres into a story they can hold onto.

The upside of that fragmentary approach is that nothing interrupts the combat rhythm; the downside is that the storytelling stays shallow. You feel the world's gloom and a character's history, but you are rarely pulled along a complete arc the way a story-driven game pulls you. It hands you a stack of sketches rather than a single line drawn through to its end.

Set it beside Hades, its most common point of comparison, and the contrast is instructive. Hades drives a single protagonist through one patiently built story about family and reconciliation; its narrative digs vertically, peeling another layer with every loop. Ravenswatch spreads outward instead — across nine characters, with a little from each and plenty of atmosphere, but no single thread carried all the way through. That is a deliberate trade, not an accident, and it sets a clear limit on the story no matter how striking the premise looks on paper.

It is worth being precise about what that means in practice, because "shallow" is not the same as "lazy." The writing in any individual fragment is often sharp, and the reinterpretations are clever — a cursed Red Riding Hood or a disgraced Monkey King is a genuinely good hook. The problem is purely architectural: a run-based structure scatters those hooks instead of building on them, so the parts are stronger than the whole. You leave impressed by moments and characters, not by a story. Think of it less as a novel and more as a gallery: you wander past a series of striking portraits, each one well painted, and you walk out remembering the faces rather than a plot that connected them. That is a perfectly valid way to build a world, and for a roguelike it is arguably the sensible one, but it asks you to adjust your expectations going in.

If your favorite thing about a game is being moved by a narrative and carried along by a character's fate, this is precisely where Ravenswatch will leave you wanting — and no amount of atmosphere fully closes that gap. Go in for the mood and the reinterpretations, not for a tale told start to finish.

Music that breathes with the clock

Ravenswatch does not have a chart-topping soundtrack you'll queue up on its own, but it scores the game so well that you often stop noticing it — right up until it pushes you somewhere. The music breathes in lockstep with the day-night system. During daytime exploration it sits back into atmosphere, low and restrained, the held breath before a storm. The moment night falls and a powerful boss arrives, it shifts into something tense and urgent, and that sense that the Nightmare is closing in comes through loud and clear. The transition is not subtle, and it is not meant to be — the score is effectively a second clock, telling you in sound what the day-night meter tells you in numbers.

That decision — letting the music follow the mechanic — turns the score into part of the pressure rather than a removable backdrop. When you stall at midday over whether to grab one more side objective, the tightening strings are already nudging you toward a decision. The soundtrack never grabs the spotlight, yet it is always present, and that restrained precision is the real reason it earns a solid mark instead of a forgettable one. It is the kind of score you only notice you were relying on the moment it changes, which is exactly what good interactive music is supposed to do.

Punchy effects you can read by ear

On the effects side, the hit feedback is genuinely meaty. The weight of a landed ability and the sound of each hero's weapons and spells stay distinct — Sun Wukong's whistling staff, the brittle crack of the Snow Queen's ice, and the shift in texture when Red Riding Hood flips into her wolf form all sound different. None of it blurs into generic noise, and that care extends down to small touches like the chime of a pickup or the cue that an enemy is about to wind up a heavy hit.

That separation matters enormously in four-player co-op, where the screen is flooded with effects. Half the time you can track what a teammate just cast, and what the fight is doing, by ear alone — a quiet but real assist for a game built on split-second positioning, where losing track of the board for a second can cost a run. In a genre where audio is often an afterthought layered on at the end, that level of functional clarity is a genuine design win, not just a coat of polish.

A unified front that earns patience

Put sight and sound together, and this is where Ravenswatch is strongest. A tightly unified dark-fairy-tale art style, paired with an equally consistent cold, fantastical score, brings together a cast drawn from wildly different traditions into one believable world. That coherence from picture to sound is precisely why the game holds its footing in an overcrowded genre despite its weaknesses elsewhere.

Strip the visuals, music, and effects away, and the gameplay skeleton underneath might not carry the reputation it has now. It is this never-faltering presentation that makes each flaw feel less fatal and earns the player's patience early — before a single balance complaint has a chance to land. Atmosphere, in other words, is the most effective moat this game has. It is the rare case where presentation is not the icing but a load-bearing wall: take it away and the whole structure wobbles. Few roguelikes can claim their sound design is doing this much quiet, constant work, and fewer still would survive without it. It is the kind of audio craft you only notice in its absence, and here it is everywhere at once, holding the whole experience together.

Cel-shading that makes an immediate impression

If there is one thing nearly every outlet praises without reservation, it is the art. Ravenswatch runs on cel-shaded rendering — heavy outlines, high-contrast color, animation with real snap — and every hero comes out with enormous visual identity. The style carries over from Passtech's earlier Curse of the Dead Gods, then gets pushed further across a nine-hero cast: Red Riding Hood, Sun Wukong, the Snow Queen, and others who all look like they stepped out of an ink-stained, grown-up picture book.

What makes it more than pretty is that the beauty does real narrative work. The visual language and the storytelling are perfectly aligned; the art communicates the world on its own. The cold palette, the warped fairy-tale imagery, the Nightmare-corroded environments — without a single line of dialogue, one glance tells you this world is going wrong.

In a genre this saturated, where countless games blur into the same pixel or minimalist look, a style this strong and this internally consistent is the hardest asset to copy. It does not win on raw technical muscle. It wins through clear art direction carried through to the end, making a strong first impression before the mechanics even enter the conversation. Plenty of roguelikes look competent; very few have a look you would recognize from across a room, and that recognizability is worth more than any particle count. It is the kind of identity that survives screenshots, trailers, and thumbnails — the game sells itself in a single still frame, which is no small advantage in a storefront where everything scrolls past in seconds.

Readability, platforms, and the real shortfall

Cel-shading also pulls off a function that is easy to overlook and absolutely critical here: readability. Ravenswatch is a movement-driven action game supporting up to four players on one screen, and in a firefight thick with effects, enemies, ability ranges, and pickups all have to be legible at a glance or the whole thing falls apart. Thanks to the high-contrast style and clean outlines, the screen rarely overwhelms you — even at its most chaotic, you can still read the action, which is a concrete, hard-won advantage for a roguelike built on positioning and reaction. More "realistic" art often turns to mush in a four-player scrum; Ravenswatch uses stylization to make "looks good" and "reads clearly" the same decision.

The release rollout is straightforward — PC first, then PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S after the 1.0 launch — and the cel-shaded look holds up cleanly across every version, so the graphics comfortably earn the highest score in this review. But one point needs spelling out, because it is easy to miss: the visual weakness is not in how well the game is drawn, but in how few environments there are to show that art off. The three-biome cap means even gorgeous art loses freshness once you have seen it loop a few times. That is a quantity problem, not a quality one, and it ties directly to the content dimension we get to next. There is no shortage of artistic talent here; what the game lacks is a bigger stage to show it off — a great hand dealt at a slightly cramped table — and that mismatch sums up the whole game. You spend the whole review watching a team that clearly knows how to make something beautiful, then run up against the limits of how much of it there is. The art never lets the game down; it just keeps returning to the same three environments, and more than anything, you wish there were more space for it to shine.

None of this should obscure the headline, though: as a piece of pure craft, the visual presentation is the high-water mark of the entire package and the first reason most players fall for it. It is confident, legible, and unmistakably its own, and it carries the game through stretches where the mechanics are repeating themselves. When people remember Ravenswatch a year from now, they will remember how it looked before they remember any single run — and that staying power in the memory is the surest sign the art direction did its job.

Three systems, dual forms, and the risk you choose

Ravenswatch's gameplay is built around three parts: real-time, movement-driven action combat, deep ability builds, and a day-night cycle that lasts through the whole match. The first two make it feel like a solid top-down action game; the third is where the structural invention lives. Every run is built from several day-and-night cycles — by day you roam an open biome clearing side objectives, grabbing upgrades, visiting merchants; by night a boss descends and the pressure spikes. So the core decision, over and over, becomes: "Before tonight's boss arrives, do I squeeze in one more side objective and push my luck?" More exploration means a stronger build, but it shoves you into a tighter clock and a riskier spot. That's the game's smartest idea: it turns the usual roguelike rhythm into a live risk-reward choice, with each run getting more intense depending on how greedy you are.

What gives the game its replay value is how differently the nine heroes play, and the standout feature is the dual-form mechanic. Scarlet is a nimble rogue by day and a rampaging werewolf by night, two kits that share almost nothing, which is why the community pegs her as the highest damage ceiling and most execution-hungry pick. Sun Wukong toggles between yin and yang — yin for recovery and survival, yang for damage at the cost of fragility — a constant real-time wager. Beowulf is the forgiving starter; the Snow Queen rewards an aggressive in-and-out style built around her chilling slows. Stack in-run talents on top and every hero opens into several distinct builds. That mix of character breadth and build depth is the game's most rewarding strength — you are not just replaying the same run, you are running experiments, often long past midnight chasing one more synergy. Crucially, the heroes do not just reskin one playstyle; Scarlet and Beowulf barely feel like the same genre of character, and that spread is what keeps the roster from collapsing into a single optimal loop. A lot of roguelikes offer variety on paper but feel the same in practice; here, the differences really matter.

Balance, difficulty, and the co-op catch

But gameplay is also where the criticism clusters, and almost all of it lands on balance and difficulty. The hardest setting is named Nightmare, and at that tier bosses pile on negative modifiers until solo runs have razor-thin margins — one misstep or one bad modifier roll can end an entire attempt. Plenty of elites manage to be near one-shot threats and damage sponges at the same time, so fights drag without feeling satisfying. Those problems get worse in co-op: the more players are on screen, the more enemy health and damage balloon to genuinely unpleasant levels. The game wants you to play in a group, then punishes you for bringing more people.

Co-op also has a hard rule players keep griping about: everyone in a party is locked to the same unlocked difficulty. If your friend is parked at the lowest Adventure tier while you have opened Nightmare, the whole squad drops to the party's lowest setting, so veterans can't easily haul newcomers up the curve, and the appetite for grouping takes a hit. Put it together and the verdict is clear: compared with games in the same lineage, like Hades and Curse of the Dead Gods, Ravenswatch is not outclassed on combat feel or character depth. What drags it down is its rough balance and a few frustrating design choices — that is why its gameplay feels solid rather than truly top-tier. The frustrating part is that none of these are deep, unfixable flaws; they are tuning problems and rule decisions, the sort of thing a determined balance pass can soften over time. The foundation is genuinely good, which is exactly why the rough edges sting: you can see a better game underneath the one you are playing. That tension — a strong core wrapped in irritating edges — is the honest summary of how it plays, and it is why opinions on the moment-to-moment experience swing so widely between players who clicked with a hero and players who bounced off a bad Nightmare run.

Three acts, three biomes, and a lopsided spread

Any discussion of content starts with the same point most reviewers raise first: a Ravenswatch run spans three acts across three freely explorable biomes — one act fewer than the benchmark, Hades. You clear the current act's boss to advance, and there are only ever those three. Free exploration and a self-paced rhythm are real positives, but with only three biomes, the maps start to feel familiar after a handful of runs, and you lose that "every act feels brand new" jolt. Side-quest types are thin too, turning formulaic once you have seen them cycle. Review after review comes back to the same headline conclusion — "repetitive content, sparse levels" — which is why content scores lowest among this review's six dimensions: not because it does anything badly, but because it plainly does not do enough.

Look at the content more closely and a stark imbalance appears: the character roster is rich, while the level design is noticeably thin. With nine heroes, dual forms, and a mountain of build combinations, the roster has genuine depth — easily enough to sustain dozens of hours. But when you turn to the levels, the three-biome, three-act structure starts to feel cramped. In practice, that means the sense of freshness fades because the levels repeat, not because you run out of characters to enjoy. You might be on your fifth hero and tenth build, still genuinely engaged, while the ground under your feet is the same handful of maps. That gap makes it clear where the real problem lies: what separates Ravenswatch from the genre's best is not its cast, but the richness and escalation of its level design. A run never builds toward a crescendo the way the best of the genre do; it cycles through familiar ground until you clear it, and the satisfaction comes from your character growing rather than the world opening up. For a format that lives or dies on the urge to start "just one more run," that thinness on the level side is the single most consequential limitation the game has.

Still growing after launch

One last note for anyone considering it now: Ravenswatch is not a game that has stood still since release. It underwent a long period of polish from its Early Access debut in April 2023 to its 1.0 launch on September 26, 2024, and since 1.0 the team has continued to support it with a mix of free hero updates and paid content, adding new characters while balance patches slowly address the difficulty complaints that dogged the launch.

That means the current version is measurably better than launch on both content volume and balance, and getting in now is a smoother experience than it was at release. But be clear on one thing: the three-act, three-biome shape is a fundamental design choice, and no handful of patches is going to transform it overnight. So whether it suits you still comes down to the simplest question: do you value breadth of characters or depth of levels more? The former it has in abundance; the latter it is still trying to make up for. For players happy to see it as a game that improves over time, that trajectory is worth something in itself. For someone who wants a full, generous set of levels right away, it probably still needs a little more time in the oven. Either way, the problem is "not enough yet," not "done badly" — and the first kind of problem is one that updates can still address.

That distinction is worth holding onto, because it changes how you read the low score. A game that botched its content would be a write-off; a game that simply offers too little of something good may still pay off in time. Ravenswatch is firmly the second kind. What is here is high-quality — the biomes are well made, the bosses are distinct, and the moment-to-moment play is solid — there just is not enough of it yet to keep pace with a genre whose best entries are packed with content. Score it for what is in the box today, but keep an eye on the trajectory, because this is one of those games whose number on a review page may quietly age upward over the next year.