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Review
I played this right after The Axolotl Project as part of OtisTDog's event: The Great Play Marathon. This made it hard not to compare Ravine to The Axolotl Project, but for the sake of people who haven't played both, I won't fill this review with comparisons. Suffice to say that I liked Ravine a lot more, though there are still some things about it that bothered me.
Ravine is good at creating a tense atmosphere in few words. The writing is competent. It succinctly describes a setting, an intriguing problem, and a protagonist to investigate and resolve that problem, within the first few minutes of the game. No paragraphs upon paragraphs of exposition; you're thrown into the thick of things right from the jump, and you're never sure what will happen next. I liked the beginning for how bizarre it was, for all the strange clues being tossed the player's way that just beg you to ask, "How will all of this come together? How will it resolve?" I was invested.
The characters are somewhat loosely sketched - there's a lot of them and the game has a short enough runtime that we can't really dive into the motivations and histories of every single one - but they fulfill their roles well.
The part of Ravine I disliked is everything after the big reveal. Ravine is a horror story that hinges on mystery and suspense, and I think it plays its hand too early. After you find out what's going on, the rest of the game is an essentially linear path to defeating the evil and winning. Every mystery is rapidly explained, and I was no longer so invested in what was going on.
I don't mind linear games, necessarily, but I think Ravine combines the worst of both worlds. It's not exactly linear because you can make choices that lead to a bad ending, but it's extremely obvious that they're bad choices, so it's extremely easy to avoid them. Since you can never lose except by making those obvious bad decisions, it's extremely easy to win. You also never get to explore the results of the bad decisions, because they instantly take you to a bad end screen and you don't get to see the full-fledged consequences of your actions.
In the end, it feels like nothing really has consequences. I replayed the game, and none of the choices you make in the first half of the game really matter, since the story goes the same way no matter what. You can be nice or be a total asshole, and it hardly makes a difference. Even things that I thought might matter, like whether you take certain items or not, don't play a huge role in the ending.
Mild ending spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)The player's victory comes down to something from the protagonist's backstory, which is completely out of your control. There is foreshadowing for this, but I found it dissatisfying that all you do to win is just click the obviously correct links and watch the protagonist come up with the right solution. It felt unearned. It was a big "That's it?" moment for me.
On top of that, you have the actual contents of the backstory to consider.
Major spoilers for the entire story and ending:
(Spoiler - click to show)The main villain is a spirit of hunger, born when an ancient tribe of people sheltered in some caves for the winter, were snowed in, and starved to death. A new hunger was awakened in the spirit when scientists discovered and entered its cave: the hunger for knowledge. This is what motivates it to attack the research base.
The protagonist’s victory hinges on the fact that, on a previous mission, the protagonist discovered that her friend was committing corporate espionage and accidentally let slip that she knew he was responsible. He then killed himself for fear of punishment, leaving her to find his gory and traumatizing body. The arc words of the story, “Why the heart, not the head?” refer to the fact that he shot himself in the heart and not the head. If he shot himself in the head, he would have died instantly. Since he shot himself in the heart, he was still alive, but barely, when she discovered his body. They couldn’t save him.
The protagonist wins by exposing the spirit to this question that haunts her nightmares: “Why the heart, not the head?” The spirit is defeated by the fact that there is no good answer to this question, because the only person who could answer it is dead. Some questions have no answers. Confronting this fact makes the spirit die, more or less.
To be honest, it’s still difficult for me to put my finger on the exact reason why I didn’t like this. I just know that I got to the ending and really disliked how it played out. I’ve also known some people who have attempted suicide, or later died to it, so it’s a very personal topic for me. A grab-bag of objections I had:
It’s so entirely out of the player’s control that it felt like a cheap deus ex machina. Not exactly a deus ex machina out of nowhere, as you can chose to tell the doctor about your dead friend during a checkup early in the game, and learn the entire story that way. But it still feels too convenient.
The way this ending plays out, it’s essentially “well, it’s fortunate that my friend killed himself, because now I can use that fact to defeat the evil spirit”. Yes, we learn later that the protagonist’s employers did this on purpose, assigning her to this location just because they knew she could defeat the spirit using her traumatic memories. But I still didn’t like it. I’m not innately opposed to messed up scenarios, I think this quibble just combines badly with the other quibbles I had.
The arc words: “Why the heart, not the head?” didn’t feel like the right question to me. I would have picked a question like: “Was it all my fault?” or “Do you blame me for everything?” or “Could I have saved you?” or “Why am I still working for the company that killed you?” I feel like those questions weren’t really addressed. Part of it is that you can play the protagonist in various different ways: maybe you’re totally dedicated to your job and will stomp out all your corporate enemies, or maybe you despise your job and this is the last straw. But that ambiguity means it’s hard for the story to really explore the protagonist’s guilt over being partially responsible for her friend’s suicide, and how that affects her relationship to the company she works for.
I wasn’t really buying the whole spirit of hunger => develops hunger for knowledge => realizes some horrifying, traumatic questions can’t be answered => dies. When it comes to hunger for knowledge, isn’t the whole point that we know some horrifying, traumatic questions can never be answered? We’ll never know the exact number of people killed in many historical atrocities or why they died. We’ll never know why many famous figures made decisions that killed millions of people. But we press on anyway, because even if we’ll never know the truth, we can still conjecture and speculate. Scientists, historians, and others who “hunger for knowledge” don’t give up and die when they encounter a single question without answers.
You can come up with logical objections to all my points above. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)on the last point: the protagonist's victory isn't just about making the spirit confront an horrifying unanswerable question, but about making the spirit confront her personal trauma over her friend's suicide. On the second-to-last point: people have different psychologies, and maybe that question is just how the protagonist chooses to frame her own personal trauma. And so on. I know different people will have different reactions to the ending and my opinion of it. But this is just how I felt.
One final factor: I've always liked ambiguous, mysterious stories that leave a lot of questions unanswered. Stories that leave their readers guessing. Think Cannery Vale. Ravine doesn't really do this, despite the promising intro. By the end of the story, we know exactly what caused all the problems and how to deal with it. Maybe my real issue with Ravine is that it just isn't subtle enough.
