Black Forest Games (the former Spellbound), launched a new Kickstarter campaign for Ravensdale. After a long odyssey from tech demo over action-RPG to a hack&slash game it finally became ... a platformer for single and coop play!

They're asking for $500k, which seems quite optimistic despite one successfully shipped Kickstarter. Their last game Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams was released late last year and received masses of positive reviews.

There aren't any recognizable RPG elements left in Ravensdale. We only posted this to complete the story.

The facebook page of Black Forest Games shows a screenshot/artwork of Ravensdale.

Thanks Thomas!

Remember Ravensdale? We saw a fascinating glimpse of the steampunk action/RPG from a tech/concept demo back in 2010 but, of course, Spellbound went under not long after completing ArcaniA. Reincarnated as Black Forest Games, they have gone on to successfully Kickstart the adventure/platformer Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams and things are looking up.

Thomas sends news after noticing this post on their Facebook page:

Just been interviewed for a years end radio show on 'Deutsche Welle'. Talked about crowdfunding. Being asked about our next KS-project I answered: Ravensdale.

During a GDC presentation by middleware developer Trinigy a new RPG by Spellbound Entertainment was revealed as one of the reference projects for the new Vision Engine 8. The game is called Ravensdale, and looks exactly like a Steampunk mod of Spellbound's Gothic spin-off ArcaniA.

Of course the big Gothic forums exploded when they carefully examined the relevant parts of the video, starting ca. at minute 09:45, and noticed strange things. If you look closely you can see that the process name is "Arcania", many assets seem to be recycled from that game and even a couple of specific ArcaniA features like different colour sets for EU and NA or the weather effects are also present in Ravensdale.

JoWooD says at WoG (summarized & roughly translated) the shown game is defintely not ArcaniA, but the technology "mirrors 1:1 ArcaniA's [current] status." Insert Gothic characters and locations and you get the up-to-date ArcaniA.

Official word from Spellbound, as posted on Gamona's ArcaniA blog:

"Ravensdale already existed before the AcaniA development started, and the prototype with the convincing technology was one of the main reasons back then why JoWooD has chosen Spellbound as the developer for ArcaniA.

Ravensdale was never "canned", it was only put on the backburner. [...]

Ravensdale has nothing to do with ArcaniA, except that ArcaniA is based upon Ravensdale's technology, which Spellbound brought into the project. So both projects use the same code base.[...]" (transl.)

They're showing Ravensdale because they're searching for a new project after ArcaniA.

Thanks to Arty for sending in the news! :)