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Raven's Cry is an Action-Adventure game developed by Reality Pump Studios, the developers of the Two Worlds RPG series. It details the adventures of Christopher Raven, a pirate captain in the 17th century Caribbean. It was released on January 30, 2015. An Updated Re Release, entitled Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry, was released on November 20 of the same year.


This game provides examples of:

  • Amazing Freaking Grace: Plays over the flashback to Chris' parents getting killed at the end of the game.
  • Anti-Hero: Christopher Raven is very much a "Grand Theft Auto" style of protagonist, being a gleefully vicious criminal and murderer who makes it clear he only helps people for coin and solves almost every problem with Murder Is the Best Solution even when many quest givers try to ask him otherwise. However, most of the people he kills are very much Asshole Victims, and he is occasionally given the option to solve problems with guile/trickery rather than just killing everyone involved.
  • A Winner Is You: The game has no real denouement; once you kill Neville, there's a flashback that shows the full scene of the Devil's Tines killing Christopher's family, then the game just ends.
  • Badass Bystander: If your reputation is high enough, random bystanders may join in to help you if you get into a fight in town. This is quite rare, but it does happen.
  • Big Bad: Neville Scranton, the captain of the Devil's Tines.
  • But for Me, It Was Tuesday: The Devil's Tines have killed many families, and when Raven comes for them not a single one of them has any idea who he is or why he's after them. Only Neville himself eventually recognizes Raven, as his fighting style reminds Neville of his father.
  • Challenging the Chief: "The Rules of the Coast" allow a captain to challenge another captain to a duel to the death for captaincy of their vessel (in practice this seems to only work if the captain's crew hates him and won't step in to stop the challenge from happening). This is one of two methods for acquiring your first ship in the game.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Originally, the game had voice clips during cannon battles that mostly consisted of some variation of "Be brave, (obscenity)!" It was changed in a patch, as it was quite mocked.
  • Cool Boat: It is a game set in the Age of Sails after all.
  • Fragile Speedster: Schooners are the fastest ships in the game, but also the smallest, with the least firepower and durability. This will be your first ship after losing your original ship in the tutorial.
  • Jack of All Stats: The Frigate falls between the speed of the Schooners and the power of the Galleons, leaning more towards speed. The drawback is that it doesn't carry as much cargo as the Galleons, which can be a problem for prospective high seas traders.
  • Mighty Glacier: Galleons and War Galleons are large ships with thick hulls and plenty of room for cannons and cargo, but are also the slowest ships in the game. They're good in firefights, but have trouble catching up with fleeing enemy ships to board them.
  • Lightning Bruiser: The Man-O-War is the highest ranked ship in the game (other than the unique ships Santorio's Ship-Of-The-Line and Neville's Warship), and is both extremely fast and extremely powerful. It also costs a small fortune to acquire one for yourself.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: The game's few bosses can dodge your kick attack and special instant-kill move, even though they're otherwise identical to regular enemies and (other than the final boss) aren't even that much tougher or more durable. They're still vulnerable to the hook attack, which deals massive damage when fully upgraded. The final fight also takes place in the rain, which prevents you from using your pistols reliably.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Averted with ship sails and crew. Damaged sails will reduce your ship's speed, while losing crew slows the reload speed of your cannons. Played straight with hull, as your ship functions fine at 1% hull health until it scratches against something and sinks.
  • Damage-Sponge Boss: Neville has about 100,000 hit points in a game where enemies typically have a few thousand hit points. Even with the best weapons in the game it takes quite a lot of hits to kill him, and to top it off he heals a big portion of his health about halfway through the fight. You can still kill him pretty quickly with parries and hook strikes, which deal tons of damage if properly leveled up.
  • The Dragon: Kensington, though he's an odd case as he doesn't actually seem to help out Neville at all - it's suggested that he's fallen out with Neville, but the game never makes this totally clear. He's only described by Raven as being Neville's right-hand man, and the one most responsible for the Tines' success. When Raven finally catches up to him, you've broken him down so much indirectly that he doesn't even defend himself.
  • The Dreaded: Both Neville and Santorio are spoken of with dread throughout the high seas, the former for being the most vicious pirate alive and the latter for waging a one-man-war against all pirates as well as the governments that tacitly support them.
  • Early Game Hell: At the start of the game you lack any crowd control abilities, making fights against multiple enemies potentially quite tough and frustrating (this is further exacerbated by the fact that, unlike Assassin's Creed or Arkham series, you have to be facing an enemy to parry them, and need to manually target them to face them; something the game doesn't let you do with mouse aim). Once you acquire 3 strong pistols and the hook attack ability, though, you're usually able to instantly kill 4 enemies at the start of the fight, which is generally enough to reduce any gang to a manageable number.
  • 11th-Hour Superpower: At the very end of the game, Santorio gives you the most powerful ship in the game, the Ship-Of-The-Line, solely for the final battle against Neville's Warship.
  • Enemy Mine: Raven teams up with the notorious pirate hunter, Santorio, in his quest to hunt down and kill Neville and the Devil's Tines.
  • Giant Mook:
    • 7-foot tall brutes armed with giant hammers are a rare enemy type that appears occasionally in the latter parts of the game. They have about twice as much health as regular mooks, can't be parried, and will knock you flat on your ass if they hit you. A particularly large and tough one is fought just immediately before you fight Neville himself.
    • Avery's bodyguard and Dragon Ray also counts, he's a big brute a good head taller than everyone else who's also known as Baby Ray the Butcher of Orun for his brutality during his time as a slave overseer.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: The Patriarchs, a Serial Numbers Filed Off 17th century Captain Ersatz of the Patriots. They seemingly are behind much of the world's chaos and hold numerous positions of influence. Kensington was apparently a member, and Avery wanted to join, but they have no direct involvement with Neville or the Devil's Tines so are not confronted or addressed by the end of the game.
  • Hook Hand: Raven sports one, not that it affects him much. You can also use it for stealth kills, and a high-level upgrade lets you use it in combat to break an enemy's defenses.
  • Horny Vikings: Gunnbjörn Árnason joins the crew in effort to connect with his ancestors, who were supposedly this trope.
  • The Illuminati: The Patriarchs are a council of powerful people who secretly control the Caribbean and beyond through elaborate means and important industries.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: Due to the game's RPG elements, enemies have significantly higher hit points and damage output based on where in the game you're expected to fight them. Basic goons in some cities are significantly tougher than those in other cities despite otherwise being completely indistinguishable. The fact you can visit almost any city in the game once you get through the tutorial doesn't help matters.
    • The pirates in Port Royal are probably the weakest enemies in the game, which is pretty strange because Port Royal is the farthest city from the game's starting area and also the place where you can buy the most powerful non-unique ship in the game.
  • Malignant Plot Tumor: Avery's schemes to destroy Kensington, when all Chris Raven wants is to see the man dead. Despite his growing impatience, Chris gets yanked along through all of the hoops Avery puts into place. In fact you end up doing about 10 whole missions for Avery, which is almost as much as all the previous main missions combined. And then Avery betrays Chris in the end, making the entire affair nigh-pointless.
  • Pirate Parrot: Well, it's a raven, but it serves much the same purpose, having served as Christopher's companion ever since his family was murdered when he was a kid. Several times the game suggests the raven is supernatural in nature, and the ending seems to suggest it's the soul of Christopher's murdered brother.
  • Regenerating Health: Your health regenerates up to 60% of maximum; to restore the rest, you need to either drink potions (the expense of which quickly adds up), visit the brothel (which costs about as much as 1 small potion but restores all your health instead of just a portion), or simply buy the amulet that doubles your hit points so that 60% of the maximum is still quite a lot.
  • Retired Monster: By the time you catch up to them, each member of the Devil's Tines are well past their glory days. Weedy is a old drunk drinking his days away in Redonda, Bloodfist Brady has spent the past several years incapacitated at a monastery due to multiple illnesses, and even Kensington has lost most of his edge, having retired from being a pirate in order to go into business and become a member of the Patriarchs. Also a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, as it's indicated that Captain Neville abandoned each of them once they were no longer useful to him.
  • Shout-Out: The final privateer mission for the British commander in Sainte Rose involves defeating a pirate fleet led by a "Captain Mack Sparrow" who captains a war galleon called the "Red Ruby", an obvious reference to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. This also happens to be one of the toughest naval fights in the game.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: The faux-motivational ship guy. He was later patched out of the game.
  • Suddenly Voiced: A lot of characters don't have any audio, until they suddenly do. This was fixed in the Updated Re Release, which added voice lines for all dialogue.
  • Thieving Magpie: Chris can upgrade his raven to steal from civilians and enemies (and himself) alike.
  • Updated Re Release: The game was heavily criticized for being a bug-riddled mess, with many game-breaking bugs as well as such glaring oversights as large amounts of missing voice lines and even one cutscene where the German dub is used instead of English. The devs tried their best to fix all the bugs, and re-released the game as Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry. The game is still a buggy mess, but less so than when it was first released.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Similar to most Bethesda games, plot-critical NPCs are unkillable, but you're free to murder pretty much everyone else in the game. Murdering random people doesn't even aggro an entire town, just any government soldiers that witness the crime, and the occasional overzealous bystander. This actually leads to a bug that makes the game Unintentionally Unwinnable, as some plot-critical NPCs are not unkillable and it's possible to accidentally kill them long before you realize they're plot critical NPCs and not just random civilians (as they're not marked as important until several missions later).
  • We Hardly Knew Ye: Most of the Devil's Tines are this. Weedy, Brady, and Kensington are all killed almost immediately after being introduced, and with little in the way of characterization. Even Neville, the Big Bad is this, as he only appears at the end of the game and gets only slightly more screen time than his underlings did.
  • Wham Episode: Avery's alliance with Captain Neville, and Marcus revealing to Chris that he led Captain Neville's crew to Chris's father.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: At the start of the game, Raven and Marcus are betrayed by the Spanish captain that paid them to kill a rival, and are forced to flee from from San Juan with just their lives. After they get a new ship, the captain isn't mentioned again, and there's nothing stopping you from visiting San Juan again.
    • By the 1.10 patch, there is a sidequest that leads to a final confrontation with him.
  • What the Hell Is That Accent?: Many characters don't sound anything like their alleged fellow countrymen.
  • Wooden Ships and Iron Men

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