Graven has been in the works for what feels like a very long time, this dark medieval fantasy immersive sim turning heads when it originally released in Early Access back in 2021. While the game has grown on its path to a full release, it brings me no pleasure to report that it still feels like a lot of work is needed to make this even close to the experience that is promised to be.
Up front, the retro aesthetic in Graven is fantastic. It really looks and feels like the spiritual successor to Hexen and Heretic that it purports to be, from the large and expansive environments, to the visual style and the moment-to-moment combat.
The dark backstory to Graven casts you as a former priest who has been wrongly convicted of murder after killing a cultist trying to sacrifice his daughter in an evil ritual. Banished from your previous life, you are sent to the mysterious swamplands of Cruxfirth, only to find that the plague that afflicts the town may be connected to the wider mystery of what has happened to you. This storyline mainly serves to push you from one area to the next, rather than being a deep and engaging narrative to immerse yourself in, and comes with limited voice acting through the game.
Exploring the world of Graven involves familiar FPS controls, with platforming and puzzle solving added for extra flavour. The platforming is functional enough, but the decision to implement a pretty strict stamina system proves to be a major headache. Running takes little stamina, but jumping empties the bar really quickly and it can take a full 20 seconds or so for it to restore. Sure, it stops you bunny-hopping like it’s Quake 3, but it means that the quick exploration that defines this kind of FPS is broken up into a frustrating pattern of resting and running. I can only assume that the intention is to make this into a kind of pseudo-Soulslike, but it feels completely at odds with the game itself.
Enemies are relatively varied and they hit ridiculously hard, even on lower skill levels. Dying sees you return to the most recent checkpoint with a penalty to your gold, which is underwhelming, but given how quickly you can die I didn’t actually mind this decision. Having said that, some kind of save system would have been more in keeping with the games which Graven is influenced by. This lack of manual saving bites hard at several points. If you close the game for any reason then returning to it returns you to the hub area so you have to navigate your way back to where you were. Perhaps most egregious, however, the game autosaved me after accidentally triggering the end of Act 1 boss, locking me out of the various subquests I was exploring to complete.
The main mechanic of the game is combat, and both melee and ranged options are available. This combat is fast paced and feels like a true continuation of the game’s influences, aside from another frustrating design choice. You have an item bar in which you equip your weapons, but the limited space means that you can only have a handful at a time, especially when more powerful weapons take up more space. The end result is that you just use the same several weapons throughout rather than taking advantage of the full arsenal. Opening your inventory to change your items does pause the game, but it totally ruins the flow of the combat so I tended to only do this when running out of ammo made it necessary.
I wasn’t expecting Graven to be such a long and expansive game, and whilst this may sound like added value for money, I found myself enjoying the game less and less as it went on. Act 2 is especially filled with obscure progression – a factor exacerbated by encountering a soft lock in my playthrough with the review build of the game. Thankfully I was eventually able to move past this point, only for another puzzle involving raising platforms in the Grimwine mansion bugged out on me and I decided that my time with Graven was done. Similar issues have been experienced and reported by other players on Steam, so I’m not alone.
In total, I spent around 15 hours in the world of Graven and progressed through the second act before giving up in the face of various bugs and issues. Ordinarily I would be more lenient with these issues but when the game has been in Early Access for three years and is filled with design choices that feel antithetical to the game’s core mechanics. The most fundamental gameplay issue is that it really needs a map or waypoint system as most of your time is wasted in navigating the locations with little clue of what you need to do to progress.
