G R AV E N
Deep in the sewers something is stirring… and it smells like pixels
Wibbly wobbly wibbly wobbly. You have entered a time warp. It’s 1998, and you’re the proud owner of a Pentium II PC with 64MB of RAM and maybe a 3Dfx
Voodoo 2 if you have rich parents. What do you play? HexenII! All day long!
Coming back to the present, and Graven is a spiritual successor to Hexen II, which was, confusingly, the third game in a series, which means Graven is HereticIV. Or something like that. The great year of 1998 is everywhere in the graphics, and the game looks like a lost expansion pack to Daggerfall but with a modern, minimalist HUD. There’s clearly some modern Unreal technology at work rather than the Doom engine, as textures are crisply pixelated all the way up to 4K rather than the horrific mess that we used to call ‘good graphics’ back then (the options screen includes a ‘3Dfx Mode’ for those who like a good smear of Vaseline across their screens). This is the way games at the time looked in our heads, the reality was much worse.
A resurrected game from a resurrected publisher (3D Realms, you’ll no doubt recall, began life in 1987 as Apogee, published CommanderKeen, Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein3D, then changed its name in 1996 and went through something of a difficult period before being bought out by Danish investors in 2014 and releasing the similarly retro Ion Fury and Wrath), you’ll fight plenty of resurrected enemies. A plague has come to the town of Cruxfirth and you, an exiled priest with just a stick to his name, seem to be the only one willing to hack your way through the zombies and monsters to help, and get revenge on your fellow cultists.
That stick turns out to be an excellent weapon, bludgeoning the undead in the game’s first section that, in time-honored style, sees you descend to the sewers. There’s no rat infestation to tackle, but piles of corpses that are blocking the usual flow of waste. Your first brush with the game’s magic system is a puzzling one—the fire spell you pick up won’t actually hurt the undead. No turning zombies into shambling human torches here, spells only affect inanimate objects, so you’ll need to find an explosive barrel (red, naturally) to bury in the corpse pile, then set that alight.
GRAVE DANGER
There’s a hint in the patch notes that this might change, but we rather like the way it nudges you toward environmental kills rather than the old mystical machine-gun. This will only work, however, if multiple opportunities are baked into the environment. Being able to set our sword on fire before laying waste, or pouring a fiery trail of oil that the mindless hordes can wander into, would be supremely satisfying, especially as levels tend toward the dark and dismal. As it is, laying in wait for enough zombies to gather near a barrel is as good as it gets. We do like the way you wander around with your spellbook open in front of you, though, and look forward to collecting more spells.
Soon you’ll pick up a sword and a crossbow, and strike out of the hub town into the infested countryside on missions for the local authorities.
Problems we encountered—and we should expect this from Early Access releases—include being one-hit killed from behind by something we didn’t see, and a zombie becoming stuck in a door making it easy prey. These are tiny niggles, however, and do little to dampen our enthusiasm for the modern-retro-throwback immersive first-person exploration action sim. Now, let’s do the time warp again.
YOUR FIRST BRUSH WITH THE MAGIC SYSTEM IS A PUZZLING ONE