Legend of Grimrock 2 Review

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.