Graven

Graven is a retro-inspired, dark fantasy first-person action-adventure game developed by Slipgate Ironworks and published by 3D Realms and Fulqrum Publishing. After spending over two years in Steam Early Access, it officially launched its 1.0 version on PC in January 2024, followed by console ports (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One) in June 2024.

Built as a passionate, spiritual successor to the legendary 1990s shooters Heretic and Hexen II, it attempts to blend old-school “boomer shooter” combat with heavy puzzle-solving and light immersive sim elements.

Core Concept and Story

The game drops you into a grim, plague-ridden medieval fantasy world. You play as a disgraced Orthogonal Priest. When a corrupt member of his religious order attempted to sacrifice the priest’s adopted daughter, the priest killed him in a fit of righteous fury. For his crime, he is exiled and sentenced to die in the burning sands, but instead awakens adrift on a small boat in a treacherous, diseased swamp.

Armed initially with only a simple staff, a mysterious spellbook, and a strong sense of faith, your job is to hunt down the heretical sects that are corrupting the land, eradicate the monstrous abominations they have summoned, and find a path to personal redemption.

Gameplay and Features

While it looks like a fast-paced shooter, Graven is actually heavily focused on exploration, backtracking, and environmental puzzles:

• Hub-Based World: Instead of linear levels, the game is split into large, interconnected hub areas (like the plague town of Cruxfirth). You must explore the town, talk to the few surviving NPCs to accept quests, and find hidden paths to progress.
• Magic and The Environment: Your spellbook is not just for combat; it is an essential puzzle-solving tool. Spells interact dynamically with the environment. You can use the Fire spell to burn away cobwebs blocking doors or detonate explosive barrels, and use the Lightning spell to power ancient machinery or electrocute enemies standing in water.
• The Arsenal: Alongside magic, you wield an array of chunky, physical medieval weapons, including a wrist-mounted crossbow, a heavy peat hammer, and a flechette-firing scattergun. Weapons and spells can be upgraded at the local blacksmith by spending gold looted off enemies.
• Retro Aesthetics: The game perfectly nails the late-90s PC aesthetic. While built in modern Unreal Engine 4, it uses chunky polygons, low-resolution textures, and a gloomy, muddy color palette that makes it look like a lost sequel from 1998.

Reception and The “Mixed” Legacy

Despite an incredible visual style and a massive amount of hype from the retro-shooter community, Graven launched to highly Mixed reviews and largely disappointed its core audience.

While players absolutely loved the dark fantasy atmosphere and the environmental spell interactions, the game was heavily criticized for its mechanical execution. The combat was often described as spongy and repetitive. More damningly, the game utilized a highly frustrating checkpoint system: if you died, you respawned back at the hub world with all the enemies you killed resurrected, but the ammo and health you spent fighting them remained permanently depleted. Combined with massive amounts of tedious backtracking and confusing puzzle design that offered zero hints, many players found the experience more exhausting than entertaining.

Quick Note

Graven is a breathtakingly gorgeous retro throwback that unfortunately stumbles on its own gameplay mechanics.

In short: It perfectly captures the grim, magical aesthetic of the Hexen franchise. However, unless you have a high tolerance for punishing save systems, vague objectives, and endless backtracking through the same swamps, its brilliant art direction is often buried beneath a layer of old-school frustration.