Tag Archives: legend of grimrock

Thoughts: Legend Of Grimrock 2

grim_pyramid

The first thing you notice on booting Legend of Grimrock 2 is how ridiculously bombastic the main menu music is. It’s a fantastic swashbuckling remix of the theme to the first game, which was no slouch itself but which feels much more cautious and reserved in comparison. Nothing sums up the tonal shift between the two games more effectively than this tonal shift in its music. Grimrock 1 was an accomplished dungeon crawler that successfully resurrected what had previously been a dead genre, but it was limited both by its design and its available resources; it had an intentionally simple concept (start at top of mountain, work your way down through fifteen levels of dungeons, escape) that it executed well, and that developers Almost Human knew they could execute well.  Having used the first game to stretch their legs, though, the sequel gives them the chance to really show what they can do.

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In Praise Of: Darklands.

Really I should just rename this column the Microprose Nostalgia Hour, because that’s what it is now.

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Thoughts: Legend Of Grimrock.

Despite my old-school Atari/Amiga background I never played Dungeon Master – I think the closest I ever got was the actually-not-that-bad Knightmare – and so while I was familiar with the theory of how the first-person dungeon crawling genre worked, I had very little experience of it in practice. I wasn’t quite sure how Grimrock would play, and I wasn’t sure how much the developers would have tinkered with the mechanics in order to make it palatable to our modern gaming tastes. Turns out I needn’t have worried; Legend of Grimrock is incredibly old school in tone even if some of the fine detail has had a fresh coat of paint plastered on top, and it’s all the better for it.

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