GRAVEN

“Side quests lack conclusions, secrets are unattainable due to a non-existent backtracking system, boss fights have awkward jump-cut cutscenes concluding in drawn out storyboards that drop you into the next chapter confused, and entire rooms go overlooked, empty of enemies and resources as if entirely forgotten by the developers.”

“The story is bare bones and practically irrelevant.”

“The story is borderline unintelligible and barely there.”

“And unless you really, really love the atmosphere, it probably shouldn't be worth yours either.”

“Combine that with absurd, out of place stamina system and save system that doesn't store information which mob enemies you have killed and you have an extremely tedious game, where you run through massive maps, filled with brain-dead enemies, having barely any plot to give you a motivation and not even having any atmosphere - it's not fun!”

“A strange, inconsistent atmosphere is present in every episode, just like the game doesn't know what it wants to be.”

“The game has a few areas with really bad framerate for some reason; even lowering graphics settings doesn't help, so that's dumb considering what the game looks like.”

“If you want the polish and 4k graphics of AAA titles then you won't like it.”

“It's not an arthouse game, it's a very simple shooter with hideous graphics and design.”

“The music is so boring and demure that I'm almost offended.”

“It consists of nothing but a plodding orchestra that sounds like the musicians were simply hired to kill time.”

“The best way I can describe it is that it sounds like they took the music that plays during the boring parts of a generic fantasy movie, where the main characters have entered a poor stronghold and wander the streets filled with depressed, helpless peasants.”

“Graven is an under-baked, torturous, bug ridden mess that suffers from a variety of head scratching creative decisions from the devs.”

“A buggy mess of a game with the worst combat systems you can imagine, the library boss has a hitbox which drains your entire ammo pool simply because the weapons do not work properly and fire all over the place, the mini boss under the library which forces you into a close quarters fight which you are not at all made for due to how fragile your character is and this is after a horrible timed door that is so hard to get through because of the terrain being bugged and then no checkpoint, and finally the cherry on top you they have disabled the quick save and load functions and completely ignored the fact i have things to do in real life.”

“Buggy with lots of soft locks that ruin a 2 hour+ playthrough.”

“Because of all the backtracking, even trying to look up a walkthrough is so tedious that I just quit.”

“Combine that with absurd, out-of-place stamina system and save system that doesn't store information about which mob enemies you have killed, and you have an extremely tedious game, where you run through massive maps filled with brain-dead enemies, having barely any plot to give you motivation and not even having any atmosphere - it's not fun!”

“The level design is bland and tedious with weird interconnections that seem random and progression relying on finding hidden keys spread across the map and solving tedious puzzles, not to mention the insane amount of backtracking.”

“However, due to what feels like a tiny budget and the lack of a proper dev team, it turned out to be completely unremarkable, with a huge number of bugs (even Steam achievements don't work) and terrible optimization.”

“Some other things to note: the performance gradually degrades to the point that it becomes unplayable, like there's a memory leak or something. You have to restart your game every couple of hours to get your performance back.”

“The opening cutscene stuttered like a slideshow the entire time and made me wonder if DX12 shader caching could be even more poorly optimized than in many modern games or if there is some sort of compatibility issue at play.”

“The game is currently priced at about 25 dollars, which is quite a lot for a game that can be completed easily under 10 hours and doesn't offer much replayability.”

“Lacks replayability. I ended the early access as a millionaire with maxed-out weapons, and that was it—no new weapons or armor to buy, no more ammo or packs to carry more ammo, nothing.”

“I'm not sure how replayable the game is. We haven't found all the side quests yet, but it's unclear if they are randomized for each playthrough or if spending enough time allows seeing everything in a single run.”

“I'm starting to feel like 3d realms and slipgate ironworks are just trying to do quick cash grabs on people's nostalgia.”

“Has really good potential, sadly it looks more and more like it'll be abandonware, only really getting news with announcements for other games and saving the important updates related to the game to events and conferences where they can use them as ads.”

“Charging $23 for a "release" that has less content than the free demo you gave out earlier this year makes this game feel like a huge cash grab, and is gonna be a hard pass and a definite not recommendation from me until full release (if it ever gets to that).”

“No character development, no immersion.”