In the Raven Shadow – Ve stínu havrana Reviews

one of the best adventure games ive ever played

"In the Raven Shadow" is an ancient game from 1999. It's a whopping 25 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. "In the Raven Shadow" is an old school point and click adventure game from 1999, released in 2017 on Steam but without any notable remastering or adjustment to make it work well on modern PCs... it does run, although you may question the benefit of that. It's got Czech voice acting, no English, but there's subtitles. There's a strange story about a medieval monk who gets into trouble and is catpulted into a dream world, but the lacklustre, severely dated presentation kills any interest in the plot of this game. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here is terrible, it's all just amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio, due to the age of the game, it predates the 16:9 widescreen gaming standard established back in 2006. It's possible they're marketing this towards people using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game is being specifically marketed towards people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming. It's obviously not going to look right on a modern 16:9 gaming display. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? "In the Raven Shadow" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $4 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.