If Raccoo Venture had been a budget game released for the Playstation 2 circa 2005, it would be talked about in the same reverent tones as other cult classics of the era such as Psychonauts and Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. And for good reason! There’s a lot to love about Raccoo Venture, even in 2023. But a lot of the time it ends up buckling under the weight of its genre inspirations, to say nothing of the instances in which it completely collapses under its own ambitious ideas and design.
Developed by a solo developer, Diego Ras, Raccoo Venture is billed as “a true spiritual successor to the 90’s 3D platform genre”. That description might bring to mind the more wide-open, exploration-based adventures from that time period, like Super Mario 64, but think more along the lines of Crash Bandicoot, or better yet, modern titles like Super Mario 3D World or Sackboy: A Big Adventure. Add in a pinch or two more worth of puzzles, and you’re basically there. If you’re not too well-versed in video game shorthand, this is a platformer, meaning you’re running and jumping through stages with obstacle course-like design, solving the occasional puzzle, combing for collectibles, and generally just avoiding death in all of its various incarnations. And you get to do all of this while being a cute raccoon, so that’s a nice bonus. An even nicer bonus is being able to find unlockable costumes all throughout the world, both in shops and hidden away in levels. These outfits were clearly made with a lot of love and care and were a big motivating factor in moving me through the game’s more brutal challenges. Plus, who doesn’t want to dress up their cartoon raccoon mascot as a character from A Clockwork Orange for some reason?
The platforming itself feels good, if not a bit basic; you move with the stick, jump, or stomp midjump as your primary attack method and can pickup or throw various objects in the world, each having their own effects on the world and enemies you encounter, such as keys to open chests or bombs to blow up walls. That may seem like a basic set of verbs, but cheese pizza is still pizza. The game also manages to throw some mid- to late-game surprises at you with some contextual abilities, like being able to create crystal clones of yourself that either mimic or mirror your exact movements, and some segments where you can swap at will between the main raccoon character and a pigeon with its own set of movement physics that can repeatedly jump in midair, so long as it has enough of its stamina metre full.
Like any platformer, it’s the level design that’s the true arbiter of whether the game sinks or swims, and Raccoo Venture (mostly) really shines there. While none of the biomes are doing anything special, the set pieces therein are not only well thought out and designed, but impress with their scope and moving parts. At one point, I found myself in a giant, cylindrical floating garden, having to walk up the walls to the left or right to rotate said cylinder and change the path ahead of me before being able to proceed. On another level, I was having to navigate thin, spiral-patterned platforms, waiting for the outer edge of the spiral I was currently on to reach out far enough to the right so I could hop on to the next, all while avoiding circular laser beams periodically shooting out, on top of a vine wall, waiting to see if I dallied too long in one place without adjusting my placement on the spiral. Similarly, the final boss was an extremely impressive platforming spectacle that managed to combine a lot of the best parts of the game into one final, lava and laser-death fueled challenge. It might sound hyperbolic, but at times it truly brought to mind some of the more clever setpiece moments from Super Mario Galaxy, which is about the highest compliment I can pay any indie game of this scope.
But therein lies the rub: being made by one person as opposed to an entire team of seasoned video game wizards at Nintendo means sacrifices in one area or another, unless you plan on working on a singular game for the majority of your life, forever seeking an unattainable level of polish. For every moment that had me smiling or letting out an exclamation of “Oh, this is pretty neat!” to myself, it felt like there were three times as many moments of head-scratching decisions being made with how the game was designed. Some of these are truly baffling and reek of no wider playtesting being done for the game, such as having to scour every nook and cranny of a level looking for a missing chessboard piece (your main story-related collectible in the game), only to realise that that fruit you found that let you see invisible platforms? Yeah, you need to grab that, but then proceed to make a mad dash backwards for 15 seconds and look in a completely innocuous spot for some platforms to jump across. And may God have mercy on your soul if you make even one mistake or get attacked by a single enemy on the way there, because you’re going to need to go back and wait for that fruit to respawn and try it all again.
I originally found myself excited at some of these decisions, thinking that they were a kind of subversive reexamination of the genre. As someone overly familiar with platformers, constantly suffering from the pangs brought about by waiting for the next Donkey Kong entry, I was at first more than willing to meet the game halfway with some of its design decisions. At the end of the day, though, even if some of these decisions were made on purpose, I can’t be an apologist for some downright antagonistic design decisions in a game ostensibly made for children, like the lack of checkpoints during boss fights, or how utterly ruthless some of the platforming can be, or how esoteric some of the mid- to late-game puzzle solving is. Let me be blunt: if you can 100% this game without looking anything up on Youtube, I hope you’re reading this review in prison, because I know you’ve killed at least a few people and will absolutely kill again otherwise.
Earlier, I compared the verb list of Raccoo Venture to a cheese pizza. In general, I found myself wishing that the game had either fully leaned into the plain cheese pizza design ethos that just resulted in a solid one of these or had leaned fully into what makes this unique. As it stands, it’s 1/3 of a cheese pizza, and the rest is a complete mess of ranch, pineapple, and sardines, all vying to prove themselves to the detriment of the overall product. On their own, any of those can be viable toppings, but I’d prefer not to be forced to taste all of them in one bite, so hand me a slice of just the cheese, please, and thank you.
There’s a lot to admire about Raccoo Venture, and I think if you know what you’re getting into, there’s plenty of fun to be had. Even a simple re-examination of checkpoints would instantly bump the game up a whole half point, in my estimation. But much like I can’t judge a 2023 release by the standards of two decades ago, I can’t give hypothetical scenarios or justifications in which I can give this game a wholehearted recommendation, no matter how much love and attention was put into its creation.
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Raccoo Venture
Release Date: Out Now
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One & Xbox Series S/X
Price: £13.49
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About Matt Murray
Matt is the host of the podcast “Critical Diversions”. A solo podcast on the latest gaming news and recent games he’s been playing. He also runs a game club, through the podcasts Discord.