The Ending (Spoilers)

[themaestro13]

Just finished this thing and WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT??!!

The whole ending comes out of nowhere and doesn't feel like it resolves anything in a satisfactory manner. I'm cool with a twist ending but it should feel like it fits naturally with the rest of the story and seem obvious in retrospect because of the clues provided throughout the story. This one was just bizarre and threw out a bunch of quick explanations for things that really needed more build up than what they were given. It's just not a very satisfying narrative, even if you take a lot of logical leaps to fill in the plot holes yourself.

Few questions off the top of my head:

1. How did Inch remove the bullets from Adil's gun? I assume Adil gets the gun from Constable Oliver (because he never has a chance to acquire it otherwise) but how could Inch predict this? He seems very sure of the fact that Adil wouldn't have any bullets but there is literally no opportunity for him to set this up.

2. How did Adil and Zellner escape? Inch and Adil just got done with an explanation that cops will be all around the building and at the end Legrand just saw Inch come out of the secret room. He would have investigated and found the two of them, so there's again no room in the narrative for this outcome to take place (unless, of course, you just cut away from it and hand-wave it away later on, which is lazy).

3. Why did Inch leave the secret room at all if he suspected the cops might be there, as he said earlier?

4. Why did Adil knock Zellner unconscious? They say it's to give him an excuse to stay on the ship but Adil couldn't have known this at the time and even if he did, he wouldn't have had to tie him up. He could have left him there. Or he could have done something else that was a bit less "concussion-y" to his future father-in-law.

5. Who set up the Doctor? I assume based on a couple lines of dialogue that it was Inch but how/when did Inch have the opportunity to do some of these things that ended up pointing the police towards the Doctor. How did he get the gun? How did he know the Baroness was murdered the way she was? Why did Inch suspect the Doctor? How did he get (or even know about) the glove? The way things were going in Chapter 3, I thought this would have been something you did as Patricia because she actually saw the murder being set up and would have wanted to help out based on her father's ethical code but this never happens and the explanation they use to hand-wave it away simply doesn't fit.

6. How did Patricia escape? Inch was right friggin' there with a gun. He might not be the most sane person but he's clearly intelligent and where would she go, out to the roof? Did she get Legrand? Why didn't Legrand suspect or detain her at all? As a writer, it's usually not a good move to have something vitally important to your drama just happen without explanation off screen.

My hunch is that the ending was just thrown together last minute becuase it's so jarring with the rest of the story up to that point. It - like the rest of the game - is just so weirdly paced. Last thing I did was hit a guy with a rock and climb down a hole and then *BAM* ending with all the characters on a beach. So many things happen at once, it's like the studio suddenly ran out of budget, had to skip like several scenes they had planned to include in the final game, and just starting stitching together whatever they had. Even the most basic adventure games will typically have you (the player) do something to make it feel like a satisfying conclusion that's building on all the gameplay you saw before, not make you feel like an incidental participant in it.

This game has a lot of problems - audio bugs, uncanny valley character designs (like the Mom), weird pacing, frequent lighting issues - but it kills me that the story was built up so much and just fails to deliver. It's a good concept, just not well executed.

[SeansShow]

Aye, I had issues with it as well, it starts out as a really interesting Orient Express, Agatha Christie, Poirot whodunnit style affair but degenerates into a game where half? / more than half? of the initial characters had a hand in the crimes. Zellner was the standout character, imo they would have been better having an episode from the point of Nicolas Legrand as the other two protagonists were bland by comparison.

I enjoyed it, but to say it wasn't satisfying or that it didn't live up to the promise of the first chapter would be an understatement. As you said as well, the game is riddled with bugs and I mean riddled with them to the point where even though I found the playthrough fairly enjoyable the bugs completely destroy the experience, are common, and easily repeatable.

[Dr. Mircow]

It's 3AM here, so bare with me.

So, I sort of completed the game like a few minutes ago. By "sort of" I mean I watched the last half an hour on YouTube due to a game-breaking bug which caused Adil to spin in circles in an infinite loop. The 'Esc' key wasn't even working. My mistake here was that I never saved throughout the entire Chapter 3 since it all seemed to be going just fine. Oh boy, how foolish of me considering that I just bumped into another game-breaking bug earlier in Chapter 2. You can imagine the rage building up inside me at this point....

But I digress. Personally, I guessed Adil or Inch very early on, as the game maybe wanted you to, and hence I was kind of correct until the plot twist. And to its credit, the twist was good because I didn't see it coming (so it did its job, correct?) and was pretty original, I'll give them that. But that's subjective. Regardless, at least based on how the ending scene played out, it felt like no editor checked the script, thus this led to a handful of loose ends, with some even mentioned by @themaestro13. And like he said, I found the story oddly paced at times too.

Originally posted by themaestro13:

It's a good concept, just not well executed.

Yeah, that's how I felt about this. To me, it seems it might have been a case of "looked good on paper, but ended up being poorly executed". I can't deny it, but the writing felt sloppy at times to me. Had its moments though, don't get me wrong, but you gotta keep in mind that games like Sherlock Holmes exist out there which many adventure fans are accustomed. So you know who you're competing with, regardless of tone and atmosphere.

I currently feel like I need to replay the game for certain dialogues (especially in Chapter 2) that I might have fazed out in my playthrough to make sure everything actually tied up together, because that ending was unsatisfying. Surprising, but unsatisfying. But after all these game-breaking bugs which I encountered, I've been totally put off now and don't want to go through this again in a very long time.

With The Raven done, I have now completed all KING Art's games and came to the final conclusion that they cannot write at least a satisfactory ending to a story to save their lives. Every single time these guys are so close in creating the ultimate (and completely flawless) old-school adventure game, they always "ruin" it with their endings. As a note, I have VERY high praises for both main Book of Unwritten Tales titles, with the latest one being definitely amongst the best ever in this genre; the original is not far off either - heck some things in original were done a tab better than in the sequel in my opinion.

Anyway, it was an okey adventure game with some glaring issues. The weakest one made by KING Art. If this maybe were my first detective game, I might have been a lot more impressed. Ehh, at least their following game (TBoU2) ended up being a huge return to form. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing a spin-off based on the Raven or another similarly themed game made by them, so long as it's done better than with what we ended up here.

Final note, The Last Express. Perhaps they got SOME inspiration from that game for the Orient Express parts, but honestly that game, while very graphically and audibly dated, is a superior and more immersive game than what The Raven tried to achieve. Seriously, do get that game! A masterpiece which many people almost never heard of it.

[slimymeteor]

Excellent points. It also bugged me how Zellner snuck into the lower deck and interrogated Adil. They had a long conversation as if they didn't know each other. What was the point? Nobody was watching, and nobody even knew Zellner was in there.

[Sam]

I believe Mr Inch was watching (he arrives first, hides when Zellner arrives, then talks to Adil again), but that doesn't help things much

[Interitus]

This is years after the OP. But it actually feels like there was cut content that would have explained more.

I remember on the ship you find broken coloured glass. Which immediately made me think of a fake jewel. Now just maybe it's supposed to put you on that track.

There were more things that I felt seemed to be incomplete. To me it feels less like the story is bad and more like stuff was cut, perhaps to save money or get the game out faster.