Legend of Grimrock

Updating dungeon crawlers for the 21st century

I'm conflicted when new games shoot for retro appeal. Terms like "old-school" and "traditional-style" are sprinkled so gratuitously in game descriptions and feature lists and Kickstarter pitches that they just tend to meaninglessly melt into the page. It's like when the game boxes of yore mentioned "real-time lighting" or "eight humongous levels" or something like that.. You see the words, and while you recognize the phrases and know what they mean, in the context of gleaning information about the game they basically just bounce off your brain like semantic Nerf balls. Unless you're like six and trying to make a case to your parents about why they should buy you Ballz 3D for Christmas (You're wrong, by the way).

Of course, invalidating what I just said, you actually can glean some information about the game when they drop a Retro bomb on you. Notably, that the game is going to be like what an indie dev thinks a Retro game was like: brutally hard, bad pixel art, local multiplayer only, chiptunes. There are good aspects of retro games, and there are bad aspects of retro games, and sometimes devs don't really know the difference and end up pouring in both in equal measure, turning a potentially fun retro-inspired game into an exercise in Fruitopia. Wait, that's not the word I meant.

Legend of Grimrock, however, does not do that. Legend of Grimrock is a well-designed updating of the formerly ubiquitous tile-based first person dungeon crawler genre. Seriously, there were like a million of those games released per hour in the '80s and early '90s, and that's just counting the Wizardry series. Grimrock manages to keep the fun and interesting aspects of an involved, full-party dungeon crawl, while managing to acknowledge that it's that it's the 21st century and Pepsi is the choice of a new generation.

Some gargoyles have a blue eye and also another blue eye.

The main game has you in a party of four prisoners, arrested for nonspecific crimes, who are given a chance at a pardon if they can make it to the bottom of the Grimrock Dungeon. The story's there, but you don't need to worry about any of that crap. The reason you want to play Grimrock is because of the dungeon itself, which becomes increasingly sprawling and convoluted and is dotted with interesting puzzles and traps that keep the game from being a horrifying, chugging dungeon slog like Waxworks. The puzzles in particular, at least as far as I've played, are well done and devoid of a lot of the moon logic that can plague adventure games. There was one exception in the second floor, where you have to teleport a bag of items between a bunch of jail cells to get them into an unblocked tile. I messed with the buttons for a while, but eventually just ended up mashing on one of them until it cycled through the locked cells and worked its way over to the open one. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe I'm just an idiot.

Occasionally you have to search for a button like that little chunk of broken rock near the upper-center of the screen, but it doesn't end up posing as much of a problem as you might expect.

 Of course, between the puzzles you've got typical RPG activities like fighting monsters, developing characters, and collecting items. The combat is surprisingly fluid given the tile-based nature of the game. In the bottom right corner of these screenshots, you can see the portraits and vital statistics for your party. The top two are your frontline guys, and the bottom two are in the back. You're always walking in this square formation, which I could see as being a point of contention for those of you who really like to micromanage what your party is doing. For the general purposes of the game, though, it works. Your frontline can hit within melee range, while the back is limited to ranged attacks and spells, so unfortunately you're not going to be able to roll four fighters and meatroll through the entire game. Delicious meatroll.

You can run the game with a basic premade party of two fighters, one rogue and one wizard (these being the three classes offered), but it's generally more fun to make your own. Character generation is fairly straightforward, allowing you to pick a race, where to put your starting skills, and a couple of special passive perks for flavor.  Racewise, you've got your typical all-arounder Human, and then three monster races that have some bonuses and penalties that tailor them as specialist races for the three classes. It's nothing you haven't seen before in a game, but it's well done and gives you some flexibility in how you want your character to develop in their class.

Combat is done in real time, and actually allows for a bit of finesse with your movements and attack timing. It's fun when I have my mage , unarmed rogue and fighter interrupting a skeleton's attacks in sequence while circle-strafe dancing around him. Frustrating for the skeleton, I'd imagine.

I'VE GOT YOU NOW AHHHHHHHHHH

Spellcasting deserves a special mention, because it's an interesting system that's a bit like Eternal Darkness' runes system, but not exactly. Opening the casting menu gives you a grid of runes to pick, and each spell is some configuration of said runes. If you have the appropriate skill level and the right rune pattern, you'll cast the spell. If not, you get a fizzle and you stamp your feet and gargle saliva because you have a few seconds before you can cast a spell again. It's definitely a cool substitution for cast times, since your personal ability and familiarity with the spell affects how fast the casting goes, as well as whether or not you mess up the incantation by picking the wrong runes. I imagine playing a four-wizard party is a hilarious nightmare. It's also worth mentioning that while you can find scrolls that give you the spell formulas, you can actually metagame the spells at any time if you've played before, provided your wizard has the appropriate skill.

I picked up Legend of Grimrock today on Steam during their winter sale, and you too can buy it at a steep discount if you hurry (twenty minutes left at the time of writing this). It's a welcome and much needed update to a bygone genre that holds up as a good, modern game that keeps the good parts of game design from ages past.