After thoroughly enjoying The Eye of the Sphinx, the first chapter of The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief, we were left a bit disappointed with the second chapter, Ancestry of Lies. This was due to a much shorter length, less character interaction and fewer puzzles. Despite this we still had high hopes for chapter 3, A Murder of Ravens.
We strongly suggest you play the other chapters of the game before reading this review. We do our best to avoid spoilers but it’s hard to talk about the game without giving anything away. If you want to be completely surprised when playing chapter 3 then you might want to stop reading now and come back later.
The third chapter picks up after the twist at the end of chapter two. We doubt any players saw what was coming and we’re not going to go into details here. What we can say is that players find themselves back on the cruise ship from chapter one. Like in chapter two you continue to play the role of the villain and get to experience the events that took place in parallel to the investigations you carried out as Constable Anton Jakob Zellner.
We found most of the puzzles in this part quite straight forward and already knowing the direction of the story probably helped here. There are more puzzles than there were in chapter two and you get the opportunity to interact with more characters again. The best part of playing as the villain is that the unexplained events that kept you thinking during the earlier chapters are finally explained.
The action eventually moves on to the museum in Cairo and again you stay in the role of the villain. The game keeps you entertained with more puzzles and continues to fill in the blanks about how certain events came about. The opportunity to see things from the other side is very satisfying but playing the villain isn’t as much fun as it was playing as Zellner.
The story manages to keep the twists coming and we were genuinely surprised at certain events. Eventually your path crosses with Zellner as you reach the same point in the story that chapter two left him. From here the developers manage to continue to shock and surprise right up until the end. So many games end badly or predictably but we weren’t left disappointed. We felt by the finale that all the loose ends were tied up and despite our best guesses we hadn’t managed to predict the ending.
The build we played for review wasn’t the final cut of the code and we did experience a few bugs with things locking up that forced us to reload the game. Also some of the sound effects were absent and a few animations were a little strange. The developers are promising that these will be fixed for launch and that some of the cut-scenes will be receiving additional polish.
King Art have done a wonderful job with The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief. Chapter two was the weakest in the trilogy but the developers are back on form for chapter three. When played back-to-back as a single game players will discover a highly entertaining adventure that will keep them guessing to the end. We would highly recommended The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief to all adventure game fans.
