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.

Where the first Grimrock took place in a series of dank, dingy underground levels, Grimrock 2 throws open the doors to the outside world. Instead of being a group of prisoners thrown into a giant dungeon, this time around you’re… well, still playing a party of prisoners, except you’ve been shipwrecked on a mysterious island. The basic mechanics of the first game all make it through intact – tile-based movement, fighting monsters in real-time, solving puzzles, hunting for hidden switches etc. etc. — but with the significant difference that the vertically-stacked levels of Grimrock have given way to a sprawling set of horizontally laid out outdoor environments. This gives Almost Human much more flexibility to play around with their level layout and how you progress from one to the other; even though you can always see the seams and the game is still very obviously made up of a collection of 34 individual levels, the way they’re stitched together means that the conceit of the island environment is an incredibly strong one.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in how Grimrock 2 handles the route the player takes through its innards. Because it’s no longer limited to a one-dimensional progression through a series of sequential levels it takes the opportunity to create a truly sprawling level layout; the island hub will have two or more paths open for exploration at any one time, and there’s only three points in the game¹ where it locks off an area to the player until they acquire the appropriate item. Other areas are locked, true, but it’s almost always by a puzzle that can be solved using brainpower alone, to the point where I found the ingrained behaviour taught to me by other games — where the seemingly open layout is actually an illusion hiding a strictly linear progression — was holding me back. Too many times I came up against a locked door or a gaping chasm halting my progress and assumed that I was supposed to come back later, when I could have easily figured out the way forward if I’d just thought for a minute.

Having several alternate routes open to the player is a really refreshing approach to game design, the power of which was illustrated by a conversation I had with my housemate a couple of days after Grimrock 2 released; we’d both been playing it for around five or six hours, but we ended up talking about completely different parts of the game because our paths had diverged so completely. In reality Grimrock 2 is probably more limited than it felt, but I didn’t care; it succeeded in making its environment believable to the point where it’s the most engaging RPG I’ve played since the original Grimrock in spite of the conscious artificiality of its core mechanics. Or maybe because of them – being locked to first person view and interacting with everything in a very tactile point-and-click manner instead of having a “PUSH E TO ACTIVATE SECRET BUTTON” message pop up certainly does wonders for its immersion value. There’s plenty of backtracking as you criss-cross the island from one area to another, but because you’re constantly uncovering new ground and finding not a few secrets you missed the first time around this never feels like tedious make-work, and in fact works towards the island feeling like an actual place rather than a collection of maps bolted together. Even if it does start to grate the game helpfully provides a hub teleporter system that’ll provide fast travel to certain locations from the centre of the island once you’ve unlocked the teleporter at the far end.

And what a centre it is. After Grimrock 2′s tutorial level you fight your way through a densely packed forest filled with horrible wargs and tree monsters, and once you get to the other side you’re greeted with this view:

Now that it’s made the transition outside Grimrock 2 really isn’t shy about hitting you with the occasional “Holy shit” visual moment, and this is one of them. The rest of the game is spent trying to gain access to this castle via collecting twenty power stones scattered across the island. You can get the stones in almost any order you want and they can be found anywhere — on the island surface, at the bottom of a two- or -three level dungeon, after killing a boss and so on. This is an appropriately freeform objective to match Grimrock 2′s new freeform environment, since it’s making you go out and actively explore that environment in order to find and acquire the stones. Who cares that the stones ultimately aren’t that hard to get and you’ll likely pick up all twenty just by being reasonably thorough in your meanderings? All it is is a driver, something to give you a long-term goal, and while it’s less single-minded than “Get to the bottom of the mountain!” it’s still effective enough to keep you picking at the edges of the map for the twenty-odd hours it’ll take you to explore all of it. That and how good the game looks. It’s not exactly a Crysis, but Grimrock 2′s environments are a hundred times more varied than the dungeon tileset in the original game, from the verdant castle environments to dusty Egyptian-style pyramids, and they’re all places you want to spend time walking around in simply because they look great, never mind the power stones.

I was really impressed with Grimrock 2′s overall structure. I was worried that the transition to outdoor environments would amount to the same gameplay in just another tileset, but it neatly twists that gameplay to fit its overall concept and results in something that feels very different from the first game while retaining the core features that make Grimrock Grimrock, as a good sequel should do. That’s not to say that those core features are completely unchanged, as Almost Human have moved to combat one of the biggest complaints about Grimrock 1: the combat itself. Because monsters moved slower than you could it was very easy to stay behind or to one side of them and hit them without fear of retaliation, and Grimrock 2 counters this by giving monsters special attacks consciously designed to wreck players who are trying the same trick twice, whether it’s an immediate turn-and-attack when the player moved into an adjacent space or a charge move to stop them from kiting the monster backwards. At first this works as intended; I was forced to stand and trade blows with the monsters instead of nimbly skipping away. Unfortunately I was also reminded that the reason I was doing the safety dance in the first game was because monsters all have tons of HP and hit like trucks. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but since the game starts you off with sod all good equipment the first three hours of Grimrock 2 were a miserable slog as I was repeatedly destroyed by lone monsters who had more health than my entire party combined.

Well, that wasn’t solely the combat’s fault. Partly I was playing the game wrong; I should have been resting far more than I actually was since there’s no penalty for doing so in an area that’s clear of monsters, but this was never communicated to me and so I thought it was too much of a risk and staggered onwards with half-full health bars until the nearest healing crystal had recharged. The character creation system is also to blame, since Grimrock 2 falls into the same trap Wasteland 2 did recently by failing to make all of its skills genuinely useful; as it happened I hadn’t built my party that badly, but having both my frontline fighters spec into Heavy Weapons made the start of the game extra painful since the only heavy weapon I found for those first three hours was a leg bone I picked up immediately after starting the game. For a while I was carrying around daggers that were doing more base damage than that sodding leg bone. It was only the presence of a fireblast-flinging Mage that got me through the start of the game by the skin of my teeth; it was a pretty miserable way to kick things off and I nearly gave up on Grimrock 2 because of it.

That’s a black mark against Grimrock 2, but it’s pretty much the only significant one I can think of². Once you get some decent equipment the combat is more interesting and engaging than in the first game, and it’s the game’s failure to dole that equipment out in an appropriately timely manner which is more to blame for my woes than the combat system. There are a couple of other design decisions that are similarly questionable (a monster that can only be hurt by a spell you find in a secret area? If there’d been more than two of them I would be beating the shit out of Grimrock 2 around about now) but they come across as being more uneven than out-and-out bad.

The good news is that the puzzles — which are as far as I’m concerned the heart and soul of Grimrock — are almost as perfectly pitched as they were the first time around. There’s some new elements involving glowing pushable blocks and light bridges which are worked into the existing pressure plate/teleporter puzzles to give them a bit more life, and for the most part they manage to avoid veering into obtuseness; they’re hard enough that you actually have to stop and think for a minute or two to solve them, and the hardest of them require five or ten minutes of experimentation. What I like most about Grimrock 2′s puzzles, though, is that despite using those four or five static repeatable elements it’ll occasionally throw in something unconventional to trip you up, like having to place items in burial chambers based on the number of coffins or walking over and under a bridge a certain number of times. It’s never entirely predictable, and through this it avoids becoming stale over its twenty hour length. That being said I did have to google the answer half a dozen times — which is half a dozen more times than in Grimrock 1 — which is partly an artifact of my diminishing patience for scouring every single wall segment in an area for a secret button, and partly the game going off the deep end during the final dungeon.

Aside from this occasional hint of unevenness — and aside from those first three hours — Grimrock 2 is pure unadulterated excellence. The level design is great, the game looks stunning, and the puzzles are hard enough that completing the whole thing felt like a genuine achievement on my part rather than an inevitable conclusion to my time with it. So much so, in fact, that I happily sat through the end credits and their appropriately triumphant take on the main theme; in a game whose music says a surprising amount about it I felt like this was Grimrock 2 telling me I’d earned it. Finishing it was satisfying, instead of me just getting bored of the game and burning through to the end.  It’s that feeling of satisfaction that says more to me than a thousand words of dispassionate analysis; there’s only a handful of games I can think of where I’ve been taken back to the main menu thinking “Yeah, that was really worthwhile”, and Grimrock 2 more than qualifies by building on and improving the original in so many ways. It’s not perfect, but it is a fantastic sequel nonetheless.

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The post Thoughts: Legend Of Grimrock 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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

Darklands! Darklands is a really interesting game for a number of reasons. For starters, going back and playing it today is like visiting the Lost World; it’s an RPG that was made long before Bioware had had a chance to stamp the western market with their own particular brand of straitjacketed game design, and represents a fascinating glimpse into what might have been had they not gotten their grubby little hands all over the industry. Darklands is twenty years old at this point, and has a ruleset that is consciously and purposely designed for a computer game. Its age means that it has some genuinely archaic features — mostly relating to the UI and combat commands — which I’m sure would have been thrown out or improved as technology moved on. The ruleset on the other hand is almost perfectly byzantine, requiring the services of a 120 page cluebook¹ to properly understand. Darklands does not fuck around when it comes to rules and mechanics. Here, look at this character stat screen:

That’s six attributes and nineteen different skills along with lists of known saints and alchemy formulas. It’s an awful lot to keep track of at first, and you’d be forgiven for bouncing off of Darklands at the first attempt². However, that big list of numbers and abbreviations enables a game system that is by turns stunningly innovative and incredibly responsive. I’ve not ever seen anything else quite like Darklands in the intervening twenty years. It puts a high premium on realism and logic over gamey mechanics, and it’s precisely because a lot of things in Darklands happen exactly as you’d expect them to in the real world that it seems so fresh and new each time I play it. I’ve become conditioned to expect games to act like games, and for the events that take place within them to happen according to game logic that’s become so rarefied and specialised at this point that it might as well describe the back end of the moon.

You want an example of this? Look no further than the game’s armour system. There are five levels of armour in the game, ranging from leather to chain to plate mail.  There are something like thirty different weapon types in seven different categories, and every single one of those weapons has an associated armour penetration level. When you make an attack with a given weapon, you only do full damage if the penetration of the weapon exceeds the armour value of the target’s armour. If it doesn’t? Then it sucks to be you; you’re almost completely out of luck because that reduces the amount of damage you inflict by seven eighths. And that’s rounding down, too, so anything less than eight is reduced to zero.

At a stroke this one mechanic changes the entire nature of the game. Because armour behaves more or less the way you’d expect it to in reality it means that attacking a heavily-armoured knight with a glorified stick is going to be suicide every single time. Doesn’t matter how good you are with that stick, doesn’t matter if it’s a magic stick blessed by saintly powers, you’re simply not going to be able to inflict enough damage to take him down before he cleaves you in half with the huge two-handed sword he’s carrying. So if he’s passing you on the road and he asks you for a “toll”, you had better pay up unless you are carrying the appropriate can-opener and think you can best someone who has basically been trained for war since birth.

Armour is a genuine force multiplier rather than a simple static bonus; a character in full plate can face down three or four baddies while only taking minimal damage because the plate will soak most of it up. Plate doesn’t make them invincible, though, thanks to the way Darklands deals with character attributes. Attributes such as strength, charisma etc. are determined by the player during character generation by distributing a stock of character points, and then further modified depending on which careers you pick for them. After you’ve left the character generation screen those attributes are set in stone for the entire rest of the game. They cannot go up permanently, they can only be increased temporarily with alchemical potions. Worse, as your character ages your inherent attributes will actually start to decrease; characters past the age of thirty will begin to suffer permanent penalties to strength and endurance that are minor at first, but which gradually mount up as they get older and older until that character is combat ineffective and forced into retirement. Once you’ve started the game there’s plenty of scope for character improvement by increasing the nineteen different skills, either through using them or by being trained in them by somebody else, but the static attributes play a huge role in what you can and can’t do and drive you to make the most of them before the passage of time starts to slowly wear them away.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but I wanted to explain just why plate isn’t a guarantee of victory when facing multiple opponents. First off, for every additional person attacking a target past the first one every person attacking that target gets a bonus to their hit probability. The target themselves gets a similar penalty. Much of Darklands is about positioning yourself so that your party can take on baddies in nice two-to-one ratios to make the most of this advantage, not to mention ensuring the baddies can’t do it to you. One man fighting four will always be at a disadvantage no matter how heavily armoured he is. Second, there are actually two stats that can take damage during combat: strength and endurance. Strength acts as both strength and hit points. Penetrating hits damage strength, and it cannot be restored except through resting, healers or potions. Damaging an opponent’s strength reduces their combat effectiveness since they’ll no longer be able to swing their weapon as easily.  Reducing it to zero kills them outright, so it’s by far the most important stat in the game. Endurance on the other hand represents a character’s stamina. Every single hit that successfully connects, whether it penetrates armour or not, has a chance to do a small amount of endurance damage. This does nothing until endurance is reduced to zero, at which point the poor unfortunate in question will collapse to the ground because they’re so knackered by all the fighting.

This doesn’t count as an immediate kill, but whoever wins the overall combat is assumed to do some surreptitious throat-slitting after the battle is done. If you win, any exhausted characters will get back on their feet seemingly none the worse for wear, while exhausted enemies mysteriously expire so that you can steal their pants. Endurance acts as a nice balancing aspect that gives poorly-equipped characters a small chance against heavily-armoured baddies. Unfortunately it also means that strength and endurance are by far the most important attributes in the game and that every character has to bulk up — even the cloistered nun at the back who is tagging along in case the party ever needs any divine intervention. Other attributes are good for certain character types – the party leader must have good charisma and Speak Common for negotiations and the alchemist needs high intelligence for mixing potions – but as a general rule you can get by with just one character having a high perception or charisma. It does sadly mean Darklands characters end up being a little bit identikit at the start of the game, for all that the plethora of skills allows for significant specialisation later.

Darklands is set in fifteenth century Germany, and its major conceit is that the world is exactly as the peasants of the time believed it to be. This means that alchemy works, saints and holy powers regularly intervene in earthly matters, and demons and witches are real threats that must be fought whenever they’re encountered. Alchemy and divine intervention make an interesting substitute for the traditional RPG magic system, while the enemies are pleasingly gothic spins on familiar tropes since they’re all rooted in the same common folklore. With such a plethora of evil beasties inhabiting the countryside, though, it makes travelling outside of the cities practically suicidal for a party that’s just starting out.  Instead, you begin the game by literally fighting crime. If you lurk around inside a city at nighttime and manage to avoid the guards enforcing curfew, there’s a high chance you’ll run into one or more groups of thieves who can be murdered in the cause of skilling up and their bodies stripped of loot to provide party funding.  Do this for a few nights and you’ll soon be competent enough at fighting to have at least a chance of survival outside the city. The next step is acquiring some good quality equipment, and once you’ve done that you can launch into Darklands’ raison d’etre: true open-world gameplay.

Darklands has no plot, you see. The game starts with your four characters swearing an oath to fight crime in a pub, and you progress from there onto bigger and better things quite naturally, but at no point does anyone give you directions about where to go or who to kill except in the most basic fashion as a part of randomly-generated quests. The point of Darklands is that you wander around this map of Germany doing heroic deeds and gathering fame while simultaneously trying to stay solvent (and this is harder than it sounds). Fame acts as the game’s score. Since it has no plot Darklands has no ending as we’ve come to traditionally understand them. Indeed, there are only two ways to have the game end at all: either have your party wiped out in a fight against something particularly nasty, or else go to the nearest inn and retire from adventuring. When you do this the game calculates your final fame and tells you how the world remembered you in the years following your retirement, but even this isn’t permanent; if you’re unhappy with the result you can come out of retirement and bash some more demon heads together for extra fame funbux.

The reason Darklands gets away with this – indeed, the reason why its open world approach ends up being so good – is because while it might not have a plot it does have a definite structure and progression to it as your party gradually grows in power. The harder tasks simply aren’t pointed out to you until you have sufficient fame, and this is generally enough to stop you from blundering into a raubritter’s castle or a dwarf-infested mine straight away (although you can still do those things if you really want to). It’s also aided considerably by its approach to all interactions that aren’t overworld travel or combat. Darklands uses a series of text adventure-like menus with gorgeous painted backdrops to represent these, which allowed the developers to implement just about any kind of scenario they wanted with a minimum of fuss. There are literally hundreds of encounter types in the game which vary by region and terrain and season and which ensure that Darklands never, ever gets old. It’s an amazingly flexible system and I’m staggered modern developers with limited resources always plump for godawful 2D engines that look like somebody ran the original Baldur’s Gate through a clothes mangler (hello, Avadon) instead of hiring a halfway competent artist to do the backdrops and implementing something like Darklands’ encounter system.

This is what gets me most about Darklands: that twenty years on nobody has even tried to do what Darklands did. RPGs have developed a prevailing orthodoxy in the intervening years which is in general hewn to very closely. Even indie developers don’t like to wander too far off the beaten track, preferring to ape AAA games instead of doing their own thing. Darklands uses an astonishingly powerful ruleset that allows for so much more variety than today’s RPGs, not to mention the fact that aside from some very frustrating archaic UI issues and the combat sounding like somebody brought Keyboard Cat back from the grave to do the effects the game basically hasn’t aged and will never age. Dosbox ensures it’ll run on modern computers for the foreseeable future, and I have every confidence it’ll look just as good and play just as well after another twenty years have gone by. That’s a relative assessment since it’s not like the game isn’t showing its age in the tactical combat and overworld segments, but that all happened early on and the game looks the same to me now as it did back in 2002. Grimrock proved there was still a huge appetite for old-school dungeon crawlers, so why don’t we resurrect a few more of the old classics?

Anyway, next time I review something and say “They should have done it like Darklands!” this is what I mean; go for variety and flexibility and static, good-looking art over complicated animations, linear encounters and a rigid, constrictive narrative structure. Darklands took GOG by storm when it was released on there a year or two back. There are still people out there who want to play this sort of thing. I’m one of them, but in the absence of anything better it was GoG who took my money for a game I’d already bought once. In light of this I can’t help but feel that indie developers in particular are missing a trick here; a Darklands-alike seems like it’d be a project that’d perfectly suit their limited resources since it’s all about doing as much as you can with as little as possible. We realised a long time ago that 3D for 3D’s sake wasn’t necessarily an improvement, so why do outfits like Spiderweb insist on doing a very poor imitation of late 90s isometric RPGs? The Darklands style is a perfect fit for their kind of text-heavy RPG, but instead I was forced to put up with awful graphics that were primarily there to service the needs of the not-very-good combat system. Indie games are supposed to appeal to the audiences that mainstream publishers ignore (again, Grimrock) so I don’t understand why so many of them shoot themselves in the foot like that.

Whatever. Just replace the last 2,500 words with “I want another Darklands, indie developers. You should get right on that,” and you’ll pretty much get the gist of what I’m trying to say here. The old adage is that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but here it rather depends on which bits you ignore. In Darklands’ case, it could do with a little bit of repetition.

1. That’s cluebook, not manual. The manual is as awesome as ever in terms of background information, but it’s deliberately vague on the actual calculations the game is crunching through to determine what happens when you swing your military pick at the raubritter’s head. The cluebook breaks all that stuff down in excruciating detail, and I think Darklands is a much better game when you actually understand what is going on.
2. As long as you go back to it at some point. If you don’t go back to it at all then rest assured that I will find you.

The post In Praise Of: Darklands. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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.

You! Are a party of four adventurers, dumped into a dungeon with nothing except the clothes on their backs. The four adventurers evidently have military training – perhaps they are the fantasy equivalent of the A-Team, sentenced to prison for crimes they did not commit – because they move around the dungeon in a fixed rigid two by two formation; two in the front row, two in the back row, moving and strafing and wheeling on the spot like a well-drilled machine. (That is, they are so proficient at drill they move like a machine, not that they are a machine for drilling wells.) The dungeon is divided into square tiles and your party explores it one tile at a time with you providing directions via traditional WSAD controls, as well as Q and E for turning.

Crucially, I think, your perspective never changes. You never see your party members beyond a set of portraits at the bottom of the screen and the obligatory paper doll in the inventory, and this helped my suspension of disbelief over the movement mechanic and dungeon layout a great deal. Towards the end a dungeon made up of squares where you can only move in one of the four cardinal directions almost begins to seem natural, in a way. Despite being deliberately and consciously artificial Grimrock is actually one of the most immersive RPGs I’ve ever played, and this is down to both the fixed first-person view of the environment and the way you interact with that environment.

Say you come across a button and you want to press it. You do not “Press E to push button!” as so many modern RPGs would have you do; instead, you actually physically push the button with your mouse pointer. If there’s a pressure plate on the other side of a pit that you want to trip you can simply drag a rock out of your inventory and over the top half of the screen, and then click to (hopefully) throw it so that it’ll land on the plate. You can’t throw things through metal gratings, but you can poke items through the holes at the bottom as well as picking up stuff that’s immediately on the other side. In other words, even though Grimrock doesn’t have any fancy real-world physics system it still manages to create a more convincing facsimile of real-world interactions than a thousand Trines could ever manage.

This has particular ramifications for the amount of latitude it’s given the developers when designing Grimrock’s puzzles. It’s amazing how much variety they managed to squeeze out of pits, pressure plates and teleporters, but there’s at least one fiendish head-scratcher on every level bar the first which can take anywhere from between five to fifteen minutes to figure out. Often figuring out what you have to do is only half the battle; it’s how you’re supposed to do it that requires the mental quantum leap. Like all the best puzzlers Grimrock is tricky but not impossible and makes the player feel a lot smarter than they actually are when they solve something. This goes double for the secrets, which are often revealed by carrying out an additional hidden step during a puzzle like tripping a button on the wall while running pell-mell over collapsing floor plates.

Grimrock is at its best when puzzling, which fits in well with the dungeon crawling setup – after all, what is a dungeon without puzzles that aren’t the Towers of Hanoi? There’s a couple of puzzles which possibly aren’t pitched all that well – there was one where I had to piece together a series of phrases that gave me difficulty because they were worded a bit strangely – but on the whole they’re excellent. By contrast, Grimrock is at its absolute worst when a monster appears on the horizon, since that means you’ll then have to fight it.

At first glance the combat mechanic is fairly decent. The party being divided into front and back rows is very important; without special weapons or abilities the party members in the front row are the only ones that can hit monsters in melee, but they’re also the only ones who can be hit by a monster attacking from the front (monsters attacking from the side or rear can hit your back row, which tends to result in one-shot kills). Hence the front row will invariably consist of two heavily armoured fighters to soak up all the damage. The back row is where you put your rogues and mages since they have all the ranged attacks. Fighting monsters can be a rather hectic affair where you frantically make attacks and cast spells with one hand while mixing healing potions and antivenom with the other hand. This only happens if you get cornered and can’t move, though, because there’s two factors at work that kind of sabotage the combat in Grimrock. The first is that the party can move faster than most monsters can turn, meaning the best tactic is one where you constantly circle an enemy and hit it in the side or rear where it can’t retaliate. The second is that the monsters all have buckets of health and hit like trucks, making a toe-to-toe confrontation with more than one completely suicidal.

By level three or so I’d figured this out, and so after this point the combat got a bit samey: if I was in a narrow one-tile width corridor I’d hit and retreat, hit and retreat, never letting my opponent get close enough to strike back. If I had some room to maneuver I’d do the safety dance, always making sure I was on a diagonal, hitting the monster as it moved into a space adjacent to me and then nimbly skipping away to another diagonal. It’s something that requires constant movement and awareness of your surroundings, but what it isn’t is particularly deep or complex. Hit something for long enough and it will eventually go down. It just takes a while, is all.

To their credit the developers try to keep things interesting by continually introducing new monster types, some of which are fast enough that the safety dance doesn’t work (fucking spiders), and some of which have ranged attacks. It’s only a matter of time before you figure out the best way to take them down, though, at which point fighting them becomes routine. I’m not going to call the combat in Grimrock bad as such, it’s just not particularly demanding and the one part of the game which doesn’t really live up to its potential.

Still, it doesn’t mar what it otherwise a fantastic achievement. Grimrock is a very well-designed game that constantly keeps you on your toes until the final level; I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the most intellectually demanding game I play this year. Lengthwise it’s fairly well pitched, taking me about eleven hours to finish – long enough that I felt like I got my money’s worth, and short enough that the game never ran out of imagination. The non-random nature of the game means replay value may be a little lacking – although I’m sure I’ll go back in a year or two – but the developers will hopefully release more adventures using the engine as well as a set of tools that allow players to create their own. It’s definitely a genre with a lot of potential, and one which couldn’t ask for a better trailblazer than Grimrock, a game which really showcases what dungeon crawlers can do at their best. More like this, please.

The post Thoughts: Legend Of Grimrock. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.