Ravenswatch

Introduction

Ravenswatch reimagines fairytale and folklore icons as permadeath roguelite heroes, sending the Little Mermaid, the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White and a growing cast of others through a storybook world being consumed by nightmares. Passtech Games, the studio behind the well-regarded Curse of the Dead Gods, spent 17 months building it out in Early Access before releasing 1.0 on 26 September 2024, and Nacon published it. Reading the 100 most-upvoted negative reviews and the 100 most-upvoted positives out of a substantial 10,394-review English corpus — Very Positive at roughly 85.5% — finds a game whose fundamentals hold up remarkably well two years past launch, sitting inside a scope decision its developers have made permanent and that a real, growing share of its own committed players now push back against.

A roster that does the heavy lifting

Ravenswatch's central design bet is that character variety can substitute for map variety, and the review sample largely agrees it works. One detailed early reviewer put the logic plainly: with six characters that "play COMPLETELY differently," the game's combat encounters effectively multiply by six, since a fight against the same enemies plays out entirely differently as the Wolf's melee-transformation kit versus the Mermaid's ranged control tools. Combat feel itself draws specific, repeated praise for being tight and responsive, and the game is compared favourably and often to Hades and to Passtech's own earlier Curse of the Dead Gods — strong company for a roguelite to keep. Visual and audio direction are singled out too, described as "top-notch" and authentically dark-fairytale in tone rather than generic dungeon-crawler dressing.

Steam's global achievement data supports the idea that the mid-game holds attention well: 68.1% of tracked players reach the game's second chapter and 58.0% reach the third, a healthy funnel by this library's standards, before the curve steepens sharply toward the hardest content — completions on the game's top "Darkness" difficulty sit around 1.3%, which reads as an appropriately steep ceiling for genuinely dedicated players rather than an early wall most buyers hit.

Three maps, permanently

Here is the complaint that runs through the sample most persistently, and unlike most Early Access content criticisms, it hasn't aged out with time. Ravenswatch shipped with, and still has, exactly three explorable areas — Dark Hills, Storm Island and Avalon — and reviewers report the developers have explicitly confirmed no further maps or "chapters" are planned. That's a materially different situation from the usual "wait for more content" Early Access pattern this library sees constantly, because the ceiling here isn't temporary. Complaints referencing map or chapter content appear across every year from 2023 through 2026 in this review's sample, including a 105-vote review written in 2026 and, tellingly, a 215-vote review from January 2026 written by a fan with over 6,300 minutes logged, begging the developers directly: "after the first 200 runs… it gets stale," asking for an endless mode and more map variety rather than abandoning the game outright. When a game's own long-term fans are the ones asking for more room to grow two years after 1.0, that's a more credible signal than the usual launch-week complaint.

To their credit, Passtech hasn't gone quiet. The roster keeps growing — Merlin arrived as a paid hero DLC in January 2026, and a free "Songs of Thieves" update in May 2026 added new secret rooms, enemies and mechanics inside the existing three maps rather than a fourth one, alongside a public roadmap that a contemporaneous report noted extends into 2027 despite Nacon's own publicly reported financial difficulties. That's real, ongoing investment in the game — just channelled into density rather than the raw map count some of the loudest critics are asking for.

Multiplayer that undersells the pitch

A second, more concrete thread of criticism concerns the game's headline co-op feature. Multiple detailed reviews describe online play as a genuine downgrade from solo — one reviewer, otherwise enthusiastic about the game, wrote that they couldn't fully recommend it specifically because "the multiplayer experience feels like a downgrade compared to single-player," while another asked directly for a basic quality-of-life fix: letting a disconnected player reconnect to an in-progress run rather than being forced back to the progression screen and losing that attempt entirely. For a game whose store page leads with up to four-player co-op, these aren't minor gripes — they describe the marquee feature underperforming relative to the mode most reviewers agree is the stronger experience.

A balance pass that split the room

A more recent and more specific controversy surfaced in a heavily-upvoted May 2025 review: a balance patch aimed at satisfying the game's most skilled, highest-difficulty players allegedly came at the expense of everyone else's enjoyment, with the reviewer describing themselves as previously an enthusiastic advocate who'd bought copies for friends. This is the kind of dispute this review can't adjudicate from a review corpus alone — balance is inherently a matter of who a patch is tuned for — but it's worth knowing that Ravenswatch's difficulty conversation is a live, ongoing one rather than settled at launch, and a reader sensitive to difficulty spikes should check current patch notes before buying.

Final Verdict

Ravenswatch earns its Very Positive score honestly: the character roster genuinely delivers the variety its limited map count can't provide on its own, the combat holds up against the genre's best, and Passtech has kept meaningfully supporting the game more than a year past its full release rather than moving on. Where it falls short of a higher score is the trade-off at its core — a permanent three-map ceiling that the developers have chosen not to expand, which even loyal, hundred-plus-hour fans are now asking them to reconsider — plus a co-op mode that several detailed reviews say undersells what solo play delivers. Buy it primarily for the solo experience and the character variety, go in knowing the world won't get any bigger, and treat the ongoing hero and content updates as the compensation for that rather than a promise it will change.