You seem tired of the superficial glamour of modern graphics, the collective obsession with cutscenes that make your favorite medium more and more like the seventh art, and other trendy novelties such as in-game maps or save systems that won’t make you cry uncontrollably? Are you perhaps suffering from lower back pain, hair loss, or high blood pressure? Have you been overwhelmed by a strong desire to return to happier and simpler times? You might be more of a boomer than a zoomer. If you’ve started nodding your head like a bobblehead figurine, then you should be the ideal victim… uh, I mean, ideal consumer of Graven – the latest boomer shooter from Danish developer Slipgate Ironworks, best known for the unsuccessful attempt to remake the first three-dimensional Duke Nukem, or for a rather solid action platformer from 2020 called Ghostrunner.
Let’s start with what is arguably the most important aspect in a video game like Graven, which is striving to be a spiritual successor to Hexen/Heretic – the story. Just kidding, of course, because the story is there just enough so that you don’t say it’s not there, or to paraphrase our current Minister of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure, Oleg Butković – it’s there a bit. Graven puts players in the shoes of a former priest who, in a fit of rage, deprived some unnamed sect member of life because the latter, in turn, tried to deprive his adopted daughter of life as part of a godless ritual. As no good deed goes unpunished, neither does this one, so the good priest is sentenced to exile and death in the desert for this, in our opinion, entirely justified act. However, our hero miraculously manages to “survive” death and wakes up in a boat in the middle of a swamp in the pleasant company of a chatty old man who bears an irresistible resemblance to Tom Bombadil, and shortly thereafter arrives in a mysterious coastal town that has seen better days. You see, a terrible curse has been cast upon Cruixfirth, causing the dead to rise from their graves, so someone should put them back before the tourist season begins, if possible. You know how tourists are – every hair bothers them, not to mention the undead wandering around as if they had a blast at Ultra last night. Fortunately, Graven achieves its dense and (un)pleasantly dark, gothic atmosphere not through gimmicks like story (which most players won’t pay much attention to anyway), Shakespearean dialogues, deep characters, or quests, but thanks to its visual aesthetics, which are, in a word, excellent. And when we say “excellent,” we actually mean that Graven visually leaves an impression as if it were found in some freshly excavated time capsule from the turn of the century.
Everything in the game is so charmingly retro in its blockiness, low polygon count, and graininess (well, well, except for slightly better lighting and other trifles) that a tear of joy could appear in your elderly eye because Graven strikes right where you’re most sensitive – in your nostalgia. Unfortunately, the excellent first impression will start to wane shortly after you venture into the first dungeon (of course, a sewer) because then you will slowly begin to realize that Graven is weakest precisely where it should be strongest, namely in its gameplay, which is convincingly mediocre. Graven, you see, like its aforementioned predecessors, is not quite a typical boomer shooter because here you won’t just shoot everything that moves on the screen, but you’ll also have to beat enemies (as well as a good portion of the scenery) old-school style – with blunt and sharp objects.
Given that you will spend a large part of your time in such melee combat, this somewhat greater choice of approach to combat sounds great at first glance, but this also brings us to the first serious problem. Neither beating nor shooting beginner zombies or abominations the size of an average three-story building, nor anything in between, is simply not executed “juicily”. In the heroic chest-to-chest combat (which you will engage in to save ammunition), you will constantly feel like you’re hitting enemies with rolled-up newspapers instead of a stick or sword, while when shooting, you will feel like you’re shooting paper airplanes at them, rather than shooting them with a crossbow, ballista, or whatever else. You will also have a couple of spells at your disposal, by the way, but you will primarily use them to solve puzzles and/or overcome obstacles (e.g. to freeze a water surface so you can cross to the other side), as well as the cynically named “Mighty kick” or kick, which is completely useless.
Furthermore, although our priest is quite agile and fast in combat, the enjoyment of the action aspect is further diminished by the entirely unnecessary implementation of a stamina mechanic. Stamina, as expected, is depleted by everything from swinging weapons to running and jumping, so you might easily find yourself having to wait for your avatar to catch his breath before you can, for example, try to jump where you already intended, i.e. be taken down by some enemy just because you ran out of the ability to dodge attacks at an inconvenient moment.
And when you do (not “if” because although it’s not as difficult as a soulslike, Graven is not exactly a walk in the park either) happen to die, the game will respawn you at the nearest checkpoint and thereby strip you of a substantial amount of hard-earned gold coins that you were, well, just about to spend on upgrading weapons or replenishing your potion supply. At that moment, however, apart from realizing that the world is unfair, you will also begin to see the outlines of another key problem with Graven – the one that boils down to unnecessary wasting of time, which will be fully revealed to you only after you start the game for the second time. You see, the developers opted for such an idiotic save system that we are entirely sure they must have pulverized themselves like dragons before making this design decision. Namely, while you will respawn at the nearest checkpoint after death, if for some reason you interrupt the session – let’s say, just before reaching a boss you’ve been struggling to get to – Graven will cold-bloodedly spawn you back at the central hub instead of the last checkpoint when you restart the game, so you’ll have to make your way back to the same place.
To make matters worse, this completely ridiculous save system is also complemented by yet another inexplicable design decision – the omission of a map. Okay, it’s not like the locations in Graven are enormous, but they’re not exactly small either, and they’re also rich in secret passages and similar things because it also strives to be a kind of light metroidvania. This is, of course, commendable in itself, but due to the lack of a map, you could easily get lost – especially if you’re among those players who would sooner master nuclear physics than figure out which side of the world is north… which will again result in unnecessary waste of time. Finally, if we add to this the possibility of “getting stuck” either due to soft-locking, potential confusion about a quest or puzzle, abundant backtracking, or for some fourth reason, Graven slowly becomes a game that pays no attention to the simple fact that your time – just like ammunition or mana – is not an unlimited resource.
This, we must admit, surprises us quite a bit because the wholeheartedly nostalgic Graven is primarily intended for an older audience that already struggles to find time for their favorite hobby, and who will therefore probably want to spend their precious hours on this Earth on some other, much more enjoyable game than on the shallow and mediocre Graven. Ah, but how nice it looks…
