Ravenbrook University’s annual Halloween festival is hijacked by a coven of witches! It’s up to a few students and some other weirdos to put an end to the Queen’s plans to spread the madness throughout the city.
Witches of Ravenbrook is a Dungeon Crawler with visual novel elements. Navigate through the Pactrealms, now twisted by the witches, and investigate the means behind the Ritual. Fight and rescue your fellow students, now turned into monsters, while keeping your team human in the process.
There is an emphasis on in-battle transformation. Your party descends into a dungeon, and whenever they run out of health, they are inflicted with Influence that will slowly transform them. Let their Influence get too high, and they might start to ignore orders. They might even join the enemies and force you to fight them!
This release is a prototype. It contains three full transformations, five dungeons plus the tutorial dungeon, several playable classes, some rare items, a dozen enemies, four bosses, several "status effects" which are also transformations, three playable characters, and a mischievous shopkeeper. It takes place entirely in the Gardens realm.
There is currently a Kickstarter ending on July 23rd to fund the rest of development. We've already exceeded the intial stretch goals are ready to reach for even more great stuff!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bottledstarlight/witches-of-ravenbrook/description
We're working on a 3D explorable environment, massively upgraded inventory, status, class, and combat systems, and of course: More! The final game will be 10 times the size of the prototype, maybe more, and you'll spend tens of hours exploring the Pactrealms before you save the day - or don't.
This game is a dark, adult-oriented game with heavy themes of transformation, mind control, hypnosis, death, and violence.
On the night of devils, treats, and trickery, the ordinary University of Ravenbrook campus is visited by a coven of witches. They're looking for new recruits, and they don't take kindly to refusals.
After a chance meeting with a strange girl, Chris Torres manages to escape with the help of a magical compass. They end up in the Pactrealms, the domain of the witch coven, and will need to explore, talk, and fight to stay human.
(Below characters aren't in the prototype, but will be in the final game)
Good game, good art even if settings are messed up. Now, problem with this game right now is the influence system, its 3 strikes and you are out, there is no slow corruption here. Lose three times, that is get 0 health for a character three times and they are gone until you find them back and defeat them. Problem with this approach is that while it may sound great it reduces the impact of corruption or transformation as everything you do can be reverted. This could be mitigated easily by adding some stats like some stat changes or compulsions or some definite change in players more they get transformed till it reach a point they can not go back at all.
(Full disclosure I am a good friend of the developer and have bug tested their other games.)
This is a review of the demo that's available. The full game sounds pretty cool, 3d environments and first person dungeon crawling with TF, but it's not out yet and the kickstarter's not even done. The demo is a fun couple of hours and though a bit rough you can see how these mechanics could be expanded out to a solid TF centric game.
Story: The basic premise is interdimensional TF centric witches attack a college festival on Halloween TFing everyone they catch into mind controlled servants. It's a fun idea opening up for a lot of possible TFs. But the party members are thinly sketched, so beyond a kind of funny shopkeeper and a humorously angry, obviously a villain there's not much character to latch onto here yet. Hopefully it'll be more engaging in the final product. A fun easter egg if you reach the final boss with everyone in a certain form suggests that Evil/Converted playthroughs will be possible in the final product.
Art: Fantastic, holy cow it's good. The monster designs are fun, the whole game is set in this beautiful rose hedge maze and the character designs are all really expressive.
Gameplay: Rough but the basic conceit of top down, turn based dungeon crawler is a solid base to a game. Each character has three "lives" which they slowly TF as they get knocked down. There's also random events where you meet various doll and students in different states of transforming and have options based on your classes and forms. This is a fun attritional way to have TF through a dungeon dive, but it feels kind of punishing for interacting with events which might take a life you'll need later. Supposedly if a party member gets converted totally you can either pay to retrieve them or have to track them down in the dungeon. I didn't lose anybody so I don't know.
Combat is pretty thin but clearly balanced in favor of the player so it's not annoying. You try to conserve mana across encounters for spells, and there's a fun mechanic where you can put stacking buff equipment on weapons which encourages exploring to get stronger which balances against the risk. Honestly you can get pretty far by just giving everyone really strong hammers.
Music/Sound: I don't really play with music or sound normally, I remember it was unoffensive.
Transformation: Well drawn and pleasing to look at. There's doll maid, slime, and hypno as tf states. It all leans pretty heavily into hypno and identity death. That's not really my vibe so it's good enough I guess. There's a TF/TG element in that the male party member gets turned female by the Doll TF advancing. The interaction between TF characters and dungeon events is a nice touch but pretty sparse since it's a demo.
Recommendation: I recommend it. It's a short entertaining game and has some interesting TFs even if they weren't my thing. If you liked their other games, you'll probably enjoy this one.
