Games events are funny things. Take your average day at Gamescom - between the press conferences, back to back appointments and horrendous queues for popular games, there's people dressed as their favourite characters, pretzels the size of your head and a furry pink puppet doing the rounds with the hopes of attracting the gaming press (or at least, us). What does this have to do with The Raven though, you ask? Well, the wielder of the aforementioned furry pink puppet was a man called Marco Rosenberg, the Narrative Designer at German studio King Art Games, with the puppet playing the central role in their amazing point and click adventure, The Book of Unwritten Tales. Seemingly doing its job in getting people interested, the game went on to become one of the highest rated point and click games of the past decade - and now, the team are hard at work on their latest creation. Only this time, with markedly less pink puppets.
Like its predecessor before it, The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief is a point and click adventure, only rather than taking place in a fantasy world, the game's set across 1960s Europe. Probably best described as a "whodunnit tale", you play as seasoned detective Nicolas Legrand, hot on the trail of a master thief.
Stick 'em up, punk.
When the legendary 'Eye of the Sphinx' ruby is stolen from the British Museum right from under the guard's nose, with nothing but a raven's feather left as evidence, the local coppers are left stunned. But our story really begins four years earlier in Paris, where we find the newbie investigator Nicolas Legrand hot on the trails of the master thief known only as The Raven, whose spectacular burglaries confounded many a detective. The new break-in may have all the hallmarks of The Raven, but there's one problem - Legrand fatally wounded the thief several years ago. The story gets even more confusing too, as at the same time the jewel goes missing, a phone call is placed to Constable Anton Jakob Zellner in Zurich - a phone call which will alter his life forever, thanks to the contents of a bank vault that lies mere metres away from him...
The game itself is set for release across the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, and will come in three episodic chapters, each priced at around 800 Microsoft Points/£6.80 ish (we'd imagine, anyway) - although PC users can pay a discounted 'Season Pass' rate up front to grab all three episodes for a rather reasonable £16.79, or roughly 20% off. In fact, people who pre-order the Season Pass now will also get automatically upgraded to a fancy Digital Deluxe Edition, which comes with a storybook, "Making of" booklet, soundtrack and a printable papercraft Raven mask and poster.
To help drum up some interest in the game, the developers have even put together a funky 'interactive graphic novel' to introduce you to the game, its characters, and its plot, giving you a little bit more insight into who the Raven is, his motivations and how France's top detective Nicolas Legrand is the only one capable of catching him. The demo is live now, and can be found here, playable directly through your internet browser with no downloading and installing required - or, you can download an Android or iOS app and play on the go.
The first episode of the adventure hits downloadable stores on the 23rd July, with the second and third chapters coming towards the end of August and September respectively. Until then, why not check out the trailer below, which helps set the scene:
