How To Find New Indie Games EP.1 (RAVENSWATCH)

Every week, without fail, I am constantly learning about new indie games. Some organically, some from press releases and some from other outlets. Sometimes these games are created by a handful of people and sometimes they are created by large teams that are still considered indie. These could be games that you already know about and have for a while but for the most part remain largely unknown to the mass gaming population.

Every week, I want to try to shine some light on the one indie game that stood out to me the most, is now on my radar and should now be on yours.

Ravenswatch

The release timing for Curse of the Dead Gods was less than ideal. It hit early access in March 2020 with the full version releasing about a year later. The bad news is that around that same time frame one of the best rogue-lites, arguably of all time, was released from Supergiant. Hades hit early access in 2018 and released 1.0 in September of 2020.

Hades did something amazing with how it incorporates the mythological story into each run, but Curse had a lot of great features including hard combat with a parrying system, illumination mechanic, and of course the curse system that not enough people experienced.

Using the same cell shaded art style, Passtech Games is back with Ravenswatch, which at quick glance looks like an extension of Curse of The Dead Gods. Ravenswatch is another roguelite using the same art style, which I welcome but right away looks to fix one of the major deficiencies of Curse by implementing lore and story.

You control some of the heroes of legends and folklore including Beowulf, Pied Piper and Red Riding Hood just to name a few who are trying to protect the world from the invading Nightmare. Each of these characters appear to be similar to ARPG classes like Barbarian, Witch, Demon Hunter, and Necromancer who all have their unique abilities.

Currently, we don’t know a whole lot but Ravenswatch will bring a new formula and experience of its own that is playable in either solo or up to four player online co-op. Two major issues that cursed the dead gods were the lack of story and the environments felt very similar. We can already see that story is getting address with a novel approach and hopefully more varied environments are part of the changes made to their strong formula.

Just like Curse, Ravenswatch will be going into early access on April 6 after their closed Alpha. Expect the full game to release sometime near the end of 2023 or early 2024.