Journeying  through thrilling and dense atmospheres with the aim of catching the art burglar, The Raven, players follow his  trademark black feather clues to capture the thief and to protect a legendary sapphire, the “Eye of the Sphinx” on its journey from Switzerland to Egypt.

In the development of the story and puzzles, we put realistic puzzles right at the top of our list of priorities. We didn’t want any contrived or artificial puzzles in the game. In The Raven, you don’t have to solve a chess problem to open a drawer. Every puzzle or problem in the game should arise naturally from the story. And the solution to those problems should also be realistic – or let’s say “Hollywood realistic.” You also can’t just stick an axe or a fire extinguisher in your pocket. For us, this was and is an experiment to find out if serious adventures can stand to have more realism. We think they can – but it is a heck of a lot of work.

This is the first time we have developed a game for the Xbox 360 and PS3. But it was also important to us not to compromise the PC/Mac/Linux version. That means we didn’t cut any corners on graphics quality or the controls. Instead, we chose the difficult route and developed completely different controls and graphics settings for the consoles. In turn, both benefit the PC/Mac/Linux versions, because the game can now be controlled optionally with a controller and it runs better on older computers.

All of our adventures so far have had pre-rendered backgrounds and real-time characters. In The Raven, everything consists of real-time objects for the first time. That means we are able to position any number of cameras and can also work with tracking shots and panning. We didn’t overdo it, but in those places where those things are useful, we used them. We hope the effort was worth it. In comparison to The Book of Unwritten Tales, we not only put a lot more time into every character and every location, we also created around 5 times as many animations as in BoUT and integrated them into the game.

The Raven will be published in three episodes (chapters). We realize that not everyone may like this. But it has big advantages for us. We can spend more time polishing chapters 2 and 3 and will get more attention from the media. The first helps the game, the second helps sales (and thus indirectly the quality of our next games). We also think that chapters are better suited for a game like The Raven than for other games. After a chapter, players can discuss among themselves speculate about what happens next. We believe that this can give a new dimension to the game experience, and we are looking forward to reading all the wild theories in the forums.

“The Raven is the most complex adventure we have made to date. We have tried a lot of new things and put a lot of work into the game. The result is approximately 20 hours of a mystery adventure with a convoluted story, in which you play both the investigator and the delinquent", said Jan Theysen, Cofounder & Creative Director of KING Art.

The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief will be released in three chapters, first chapter – July 23rd 2013, second chapter – August 27th 2013, third chapter – September 24th 2013. The boxed version including all three chapters will be released October 24th 2013.

If you want to buy the game, you can do so here.