Some games tell you what they are right in the title. Fire up a Street Fighter and you know you're down for a brawl. Others are a little cagier, but tell you what they're about with a subtitle or a tagline: Undertale's "The RPG game where you don't have to destroy anyone," for instance. Some games, though, market themselves one way, and it turns out they're something very different once pixels meet eyeballs.
Legend of Grimrock is one of those peculiar genre-bending bait-and-switch games. It would be natural to mistake it for a role-playing game of some sort. You generate characters with various statistics that affect their performance. You juggle equipment and supplies, solve puzzles, level up, and so on. But if we judge genre by what you'll spend most of your time doing, or what skills will weigh most on your success or failure, Grimrock only has "RPG elements." Rather, it's a sort of first-person tactical rhythm action game.
One of the many and varied dance partners you'll square up to. So many feet to trip over!
To explain what I mean by that, I need to describe Grimrock's system of movement and combat. You and the monsters in the environment move around on a grid, stepping from one tile to another in orthogonal directions. It takes a moment for you or a critter to take a step from one tile to the next, or to change facing on a tile. You can attack a monster in front of you by clicking one of your weapons, which then goes on cooldown for several seconds.
If this were primarily an RPG, you'd engage with an opponent and trade attacks until one or the other yields, the outcome determined by dice rolls and the strength of your equipment and character builds. Try that in Grimrock, though, and you'll get absolutely murdered. The monsters strike faster than you, they hit more often, and just a few blows will send even your toughest fighter to an early grave.
What to do, then? You dance. Taking a step from one tile to the next costs you nothing, gets you out of reach of injury, and forces the monster to move or reorient to pursue. You move faster than most of them, and your attacks, once recharged, fire instantly on click. So you hack, step away, wait, hack as the monster steps back into range, step away, wait... rhythm action!
Just so you know, at one point you must fight a mechanized cube that rolls around and tries to squash you. I don't have anything specific to say about that. I don't know there's anything anyone can say about that.
The game does throw you plenty of curveballs to keep this interesting. Some monsters will strike without turning to face you, or crab-walk sideways, making it harder to anticipate where they'll move. Pits, traps, and dead ends constrain where you can safely dodge to. To cast spells, you'll need to click a pattern of glyphs on a 3x3 grid, all in real time. Fumble and you'll probably take some hits!
Grimrock's RPG elements, then, merely modulate the underlying music-less dance-a-thon. Build your fighters well, and you'll take down each monster in fewer measures. But I'm convinced you could play just fine accepting defaults, or simply nabbing whatever levelup skills look cool, so long as your rhythm chops are good!
Next up in my play queue is the cult RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. I may play a shorter title as a spacer first, but I'm game to tackle this monster soon. It features a highly nuanced character creation system; do you have a favorite archetype you think I should try? A technologist with absurd clockwork weaponry? A snooty high elf with necromantic magic? Let me know!
My play queue for reviews to come. Legend of Grimrock was recommended by Brendan; you, too, can guide my selections with a comment here!
My Steam wishlist. Feed my backlog and I'll play and review your gift straightaway!
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