Legend of Grimrock 2 Review

I have to be honest: I very nearly didn’t pick up Legend of Grimrock 2. The little voice in my head – the nasally-voiced infinite font of boring-but-reasonable courses of action – had a list that rolled all the way down my ear canal on why it was a poor choice. “You didn’t play the first one. It’s clearly not aimed at you. You aren’t nostalgic for the genre. Steer clear and do some studying, you lazy bum.” Well, screw that voice; he’s been plotting against me ever since I tried to fish him out with a screwdriver. I played Grimrock 2 as a clueless outsider, and as I’ve mentioned before, that’s a valuable viewpoint to have, since new ones are created every day. I’ve got some good news for you, fellow outsider: Grimrock 2 is worth your time… provided you’re willing to donate a lot of it.

So here’s the crash-course. Your party, by default, contains the four pre-requisite fantasy adventurers: the Fighter, the Tank, the Wizard and the Other One (alright, so he’s an alchemist, but face it: he’s the fourth wheel here). You can change your starting stats if you really want, but this is probably the configuration that most people are going to go with. Anyway, you were all imprisoned on a ship – because when any watchman worth his salt sees a quartet like this walk into town, he knows that the ancient, unspeakable, world-devouring monstrosity can’t be far behind – which, at the whim of the remote Isle of Nex’s mysterious overseer, was magically shipwrecked during a storm. Waking up on the island, it’s clear that the only means of escape is to get to the bottom of whatever the island master – see, it’s ‘island master’, not ‘dungeon master’, because Grimrock is original like that – has in store for you, a goal that your group implicitly agrees can best be achieved by entering a strict two-by-two formation and marching everywhere in one-meter lockstep strides. Yup, it’s an old-school first-person dungeon crawler, a genre that seems to be doing unusually well as of late considering its blatant foundations in nostalgia, but hey, this is a sequel; the original can’t have been too bad, right?

And now we get to the crux of the problem with criticising a game like Grimrock 2: just about every complaint I have about it isn’t so much a problem with the quality of the game as it is an inherent feature of the genre itself, and any attempt to bring up such faults feels like taking a motorcycle back to the dealership and dressing-down the salesman because it has fewer wheels than a car. “Well, yes,” he says, blinking in mild confusion. “That’s rather the point. What did you expect?” I don’t know. Maybe I just want to go on an opinionated rant in the middle of the showroom floor about what a massively unintuitive pain the format is. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I don’t see any way this could possibly go wrong.

What Grimrock 2 really demonstrates well, more than anything else, is just how much old-school dungeon crawlers hate your sanity, your blood pressure, and your guts. That’s to be expected to a certain extent – I mean, it’s a dungeon crawler, not a pleasant peaceful meadow crawler – but some of the decisions it makes are exactly the sort of old-fashioned dross that the industry abandoned for really good reasons. Combing every last square of wall in a dungeon for the hidden button that’ll let you proceed is an excruciatingly boring task, exacerbated by your inability to make like the Quake marine and just diagonally grind your face along them while hammering the ‘use’ button, but that seems like a mere drop in a rainstorm when compared to the game world at large. I’m sure we can all agree that having an objective marker dangled in front of your stupid face like a carrot on a stick is patronising at best, and a patch-job for awful level design at the worst, but at the far, far end of the spectrum sits an equally-distasteful experience embodied by Grimrock 2, where aeons are spent checking every last nook and cranny of the entire map until you finally stumble, often by sheer dumb luck, into the one area that represents progress. It’s like filling out map squares in Super Metroid whenever you get stuck, except instead of dropping Power Bombs and terrorising the local wildlife, you pore over obtuse riddles and pick mushrooms. I appreciate that if an area is full of ogres currently wiping their bottoms with the tattered remains of your armour you can always wander off in some unrelated direction and see if you find something else, but after so many hours of trekking back and forth across the same tired ground with such regularity that I’m on a first-name basis with every single one of the sentient statue heads, I would kill for a giant skybox-spanning neon arrow that just pointed me in the direction of whatever detail I’d missed.

Fortunately the puzzles are a teensy bit less likely to leave you floundering about, though they definitely require you to beat your head against a wall or two until you’ve mentally shifted into the peculiar state of mind required to solve them. A lot of the time the actual clues you receive are fairly straightforward instructions, and the trouble isn’t in following them so much as trying to mentally replicate the pretzel-shaped logic that maps them to your surroundings. “’Under, under, over, over, over’?” I said, scrutinising the crumpled scroll in my hand. “Why, that must refer to that footbridge I passed not five minutes ago.” So I gleefully wandered off, full of pride for working that one out right away, unaware that I would spend the next twenty minutes hopelessly trial-and-erroring my way through every last possible definition of ‘over’ and ‘under’ with a messy lack of diligence you can only get from being utterly bored to tears. For lack of a better word, the puzzles feel very videogame-y, forcing you to think of your environment not as a character but as a player. Does it really make sense to have a door that opens when you walk in a certain direction, or place a certain item in an alcove? Hardly, but in the world of Grimrock 2 it’s the kind of possibility you need to be ever-aware of.

Then there’s the combat. It takes place in real-time – the way proper, hard-drinking, bear-punching men fight – but of course, the interface and general format of the game are decidedly more suited to turn-based combat, creating an experience that’s about as smooth and natural as playing tether-ball with both your legs in plaster casts. That’s not to say that tile-centric combat doesn’t have its merits – preventing more than one enemy from swarming you in a narrow corridor, for instance – but the implementation just seems to have taken the worst of both worlds and nailed them together. In order to fight an enemy – and, this being a dungeon crawler, there are rather a lot of those – you walk up to them and slap your hands on your party’s ‘attack’ icons like a child on a grand piano until they explode into fairy dust. At least if the monsters waited their turn, that might have injected some order and strategy into the otherwise utterly uninvolving proceedings, but as it is all you have time for is ‘attack, attack, attack, cast spell, attack’, with a sideways dodge thrown in here and there if you’re feeling fancy.

While the interface is indeed pretty intuitive, it’s still far too unwieldy for drinking potions and using consumables in a hurry, unless you want them taking up your valuable weapon slots. Hotbars are the mark of true heresy in Grimrock’s universe, apparently. Some encounters demand that you really do consistently dodge attacks – a rather nasty recurring boss fight with a gibbering leprechaun springs immediately to mind – which would, in any sensible context, require good timing, awareness and a certain fuzzy understanding of where and when attacks hit. In Grimrock 2, the same applies, but rather than elegantly dashing out of the way of a subtly-telegraphed attack, you awkwardly shuffle everybody one square over like you’re letting a rude cyclist past and hope for the best. It sure is a shame that modern technology hasn’t come up with a better system for first-person movement, eh?

Alright, that wasn’t fair; first person games have always been a bit iffy when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, and making it conform to tiles like this seems to work as well as anything else. Still, it comes at a price: the immersion being fed through a wood-chipper and scattered to the four winds. Grimrock 2 is quite possibly the least immersive first-person game I have ever encountered. It’s not for lack of trying, mind: eerie ambience not entirely unlike that of Thief II pervades the game’s many dungeons, and when combined with the rolling mists above or flickering torch-lit gloom below, it certainly does a decent job of trying to make a suitably oppressive atmosphere. Alas, it’s all for naught, partially because you’re likely to backtrack across every dungeon so many times that even the deepest, darkest corridors become as mundane as your daily route to work, and partially because the first time you come across four skeletons shuffling aimlessly around in cardinal directions like a tour group with a fold-out map, the illusion is utterly shattered. Few things can make a game world feel artificial like the creeping sense that it doesn’t reflect a believable space, and I ask you, what space could be more unbelievable than an entire island that conforms to a 1-by-1 meter grid? Unless it turns out that it was originally settled by a fanatical level-editor-worshipping cult of stonemasons, miners and landscape gardeners, I find it somewhat hard to swallow. There really is a level editor, incidentally. It looks like a fairly solid tool and I can’t wait to see the wide variety of depraved traps that people will inevitably cook up in it. That will be all.

Ready for the big U-turn yet? Do you see this game, Grimrock 2, that I’ve just spent five or six paragraphs savaging? I am fixated upon it. I’m nearly thirty hours in, with the deaths of multiple secret bosses under my belt, and kitted out with so much extra loot that I’m practically leaving a trail of the stuff everywhere I go. I am devouring this game. I have gone above and beyond what’s necessary to write this review, and when I’m done writing I’m probably going to go back and finish it. It’s my inner Metroidvaniac, if you’ll excuse the on-the-spot language butchery; the little part of me that needs to see everything, go everywhere, dig up every secret. It’s that beautiful “aha” moment when the door creaks open, or the wall rumbles aside, or the trapdoor swings loose, and something new and mysterious beckons out of the gloom before you. Grimrock 2 is a gloriously rich source of that exploration, obscuring its prizes and keeping entire levels locked away, offering the tantalising promise of the unknown if you just look a little bit harder. Does it get tedious? Does it ever. I think I once spent three bleeding hours walking around in a brain-dead stupor accomplishing absolutely bugger-all. Nevertheless, the fact that the game kept me like that for that long – as opposed to what usually happens when a game gets tedious, where I close it, write some more rude words about it and sod off back to some other game – should be a testament to how good it feels when you finally push through.

It’s also somewhat refreshing to play an RPG that hasn’t been so unthinkingly stuffed with text that it vomits up its side-quests all over the pavement. Since your four adventurers are pretty much the only living things on the island capable of holding a decent conversation, there’s essentially no dialogue, and while you do technically occasionally find scraps of lore, they’re usually just the length of a Ye Olde Twitter post and do little more than warn you of upcoming danger or clue you in on a puzzle. It might sound horrifically dull next to the likes of, say, Skyrim, but it merely sets a different, lonelier tone: you are exploring unmapped lands, treading where few have done before, living on the frontier. Nobody is around to tell you the story so far because there is no story so far; just four unlucky saps being toyed with by some omniscient jerk in a fancy robe. Having said that, I find that the concept of a party doesn’t really mesh well with this minimal approach to storytelling, since there’s no communication or conflict within the group itself. One silent, faceless, personality-free knob-head is at least an opportunity for the player to project themselves and maybe claw back some small shred of immersion; four silent, faceless, personality-free knob-heads is just an awkward forum-board meet-up. I suppose the idea is that you’re supposed to fill in the witty banter yourself, but sadly I’m only prepared to orchestrate entire conversations between fictional characters within the context of my planned video game sitcom fanfics, so I’m afraid you’re all out of luck, Grimrock 2.

I won’t blame you in the slightest if you don’t like Grimrock 2. It’s the kind of game that lets you get one foot on the threshold before slamming the door on your toes; an unforgiving, often impenetrable game from an age when finishing the story was a serious achievement in itself. It’s not even of the Dark Souls variety, where the only thing standing between you and success is your own mechanical incompetence; here, you could just as easily be thwarted because you forgot to pick up an item, or missed a tiny switch in a wall. Normally I would dismiss it as a game for those with inhuman levels of tolerance for tedium and nonsense puzzles, but there’s no denying its strength here: if you want a game that embodies the irresistible draw of the unexplored, treacherous, deviously-trapped dungeon, there’s no finer choice. Well, except the first game, potentially. I think I need to get around to that one now.