REVIEW / Ritual of Raven (Switch)

I found myself enveloped in a curious blend of everyday magic and pixel-charm playing Ritual of Raven, where tending gardens and enchanting constructs becomes part of a witch’s everyday tasks. As an apprentice witch tasked with repairing a fractured world after a portal mishap, I navigated spells, relationships, and routines that felt as intuitive as reading tea leaves. The gameplay leans toward peaceful routine rather than flashing action, inviting a more reflective pace that celebrates the sacred in the mundane.

Ritual of Raven sidesteps traditional cozy games’ farming mechanics by putting robots called Arcana Constructs between you and the harvest. You don’t hoe and pick, you program and bless, and that shift gives the loop a programmatic feel. Enchanting and positioning constructs turned gardening into a programming puzzle: the herbs respond visually and audibly as your spells take hold, and the Book of Shadows keeps your to-dos feeling like a mix of spellcraft and logic puzzles. That said, some of the UI feels built around mouse controls; I found certain selection and placement tasks fiddly when I tried to muscle them through with the gamepad and thought this could be better played on a PC or Switch 2 with a mouse.

On a pure sensory level, Ritual of Raven is a love letter to witchy aesthetics. The pixel art palette is soft and strange, brimful of lavender nights and emerald brambles. The soundtrack leans into lullaby synths and gentle percussion that made me want to light a virtual candle and take notes in a real notebook; it’s the sort of score that turns idle walking into reflective practice. These design choices make the game’s world feel like a functioning coven: warm, a little uncanny, and always ready to teach you something new.

Narratively, I appreciated how the game weaves folklore with small human losses. The portal mishap leaves a personal grief for the first non-playable character you meet in the world. Conversations are short but sweet, and the ritual beats (learning a new glyph, performing a balancing ceremony) land emotionally because the world clarifies what’s at stake: stability, belonging, and the patient rebuilding of trust. If you want big, explosive plot twists you won’t find them here. You will instead you get slow-burning character work and rituals that feel meaningful because the game treats them with ceremony.

There are quality-of-life hiccups that poke at the cozy veneer. As previously mentioned, Inventory screens and some menu navigation are built for pointer input, and while the cursor-based design works beautifully in theory, using a controller can turn even simple actions into awkward and frustrating movements. I bumped into at least one input quirk where closing menus or flipping through my grimoire felt clunky, breaking the immersive rhythm the game otherwise builds so well. 

Performance-wise, the game runs smoothly and keeps its focus on the atmosphere and routine. Load times are short, transitions are clean, and the gentle pacing feels perfectly tuned for late-night play sessions. The magic of Ritual of Raven lies in how little it tries to impress you; it’s content to hum softly in the background like a comfort spell that never overstays its welcome.

Ritual of Raven is a gentle spell woven from stardust, soil, and sincerity. It captures the rhythm of magical living (i.e., slow, deliberate, and deeply personal) while occasionally stumbling over its own control scheme. Still, when the candles are lit and the soundtrack hums like a distant incantation, it’s easy to forgive those flaws. The heart of the game beats steady, like a chant repeated under moonlight.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.