Take one good look at Ravenlok and you’ll see Lewis Carroll’s fingerprints embed onto every voxel. Alice’s two literary adventures in Wonderland (plus several other adaptations) have clearly influenced developer Cococucumber, from the outsized teapots, off-brand Queen Of Hearts, and fish-out-of-water-into-a-fairytale-world setup. Ravenlok shares more than just surface-level nods to that classic book, though. Yes, it’s beautiful and dreamlike, but it’s also just as disorganised and nonsensical as Alice’s growing brain – for better and for worse.
Ravenlok is another gorgeous voxel adventure from Cococucumber, the delightfully named studio behind Echo Generation, only this time the turn-based combat is replaced by real-time slashing, and the retro-80s vibes get switched with a storybook world. The journey begins with your heroine chilling under a tree in the regular old world, before walking through a strange mirror and into the magical world of Dunia. A white rabbit quickly explains that she’s the nondescript chosen one, the titular Ravenlok, and you’re then swiftly sent to deal with the evil Queen plaguing the world.
What follows is an endless cycle of MacGuffin after MacGuffin that runs so deep, you almost forget why you’re tumbling down this rabbit hole. As you’re pushed through a revolving series of fetch quests, the game speedruns through important events and quickly abandons potentially interesting characters, meaning everything feels paper-thin. Even Ravenlok (the hero, not the game) feels one-note, as she’s never given enough time to meaningfully interact with the wacky cast; most of her conversations are polite and frictionless, almost like she’s keeping us at arm’s length. The credits roll before you truly understand either how the world works, or who any of these colourful characters are.
