Feathered friend
A Raven Monologue takes flight.
Plucked from the storybook end of the gaming spectrum, A Raven Monologue is a beautifully touching set of scenes following a raven and his interactions with the people of a village. It’s an exercise in wordless storytelling, so there’s no text, but accompanying the panels is a looping song by Christabel Annora. The music—indeed the whole project—has a bittersweet delicacy I tend to associate more with gently sad Scandinavian indie music. It probably wouldn’t be out of place in a Christmas commercial, but it manages to avoid being overly emotionally manipulative. Instead, it just feels honest and sweet—more akin to a touching Pixar short.
A Raven Monologue was produced as part of an internal game jam at Indonesian developer Mojiken. The jam was focused on telling stories using a constrained work of interactive art, hence the wordlessness and the only interactions in the game being to move right and left through the panels. With this piece, its creators hit a balance between ambiguity in the story and the specificity of the mood they’re conveying.
To maintain as much of that ambiguity as possible, I’d suggest skipping the descriptions on the game sale platform you use as much as possible and just opening it up and seeing what you think first.
You can experience all of the story panels the game has to offer in around five minutes, which, on Steam particularly, makes it feel like a tiny jewel in amongst longer or more traditional experiences. I found myself going back a few times, or just letting the music loop in the background as I worked.