Indeed it’s in that montage that the game truly shines. But that’s fine, because those other elements, woven together with considerable skill, are easily enough to keep the game together.
Forget the plot, which is contrived and uninteresting. These central elements are powered along by the Skinner Box of role-playing acquisition, pushing you to one more skill point, one more magic item, one last puzzle before you switch off. Combat is married with those fiendish puzzles, creating a striking counterpoint between thinking and acting. But the drill remains the same: back off, find a room, start circling.Īlone, it’d be a dull way to spend the 20 hours it’ll take to complete Grimrock. To thwart that ambition, enemies are deployed in labyrinthine passageways or thrown at you in hordes. In open spaces you can circle them, maneuvering to avoid their blows and landing yours as they lumber across the granite. Most creatures are slow, and the four directional, grid-based layout requires them to move and turn to face you before they can attack. Otherwise a torment of re-loading and clicking awaits.Īnd it’s a particular torment, because combat in Grimrock is the weakest area of the game. To win, you must defeat the multitude of monsters dwelling in the darkness, and to do that you’ll want at least some of the items and experience offered by the tougher puzzles. The closest it gets is making the crucial puzzles you need to progress easier than the inessential ones for items and experience. It cares nothing for such niceties of modern design as difficulty curves, or player involvement. Fail to solve an essential problem and there’s nothing left for you but the ignominy of seeking a solution online, or your game is over. It’s a montage of role-playing, real-time combat and puzzles as cold and hard and uncaring as the stone from which the dungeon is hewn.
Grimrock, you see, was made in the image of 1987 classic Dungeon Master, even down to the walking mushrooms and a spell system that requires you to memorise and click on sequences of runes. Built in an astonishing variety from a limited palette of switches, pressure plates and teleports, they’ll frustrate and delight in equal measure. Some are logical, some time-based, some situational, others are riddles but all of them encourage experimentation and exploration as part of the solution, rewarding creative thinking as much if not more than logic. But the puzzles in Grimrock are different.
They seem drab, lifeless things, a poor use of all the mighty power of modern microprocessors. Say it enough and the solution of a puzzle may fall out of the repetition, might give me a few hours respite from agonising over the intricacies of the game. A word I keep rolling around my tongue like an abjuration.
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