What? A first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, on Steam? Did they remake one of the classics? Apparently not. Legend of Grimrock is a successor to games like Eye of the Beholder, delivering primarily on the aesthetics of discovery, challenge and fantasy. The genre was long thought dead, succeeded in some aspect by the Roguelike. But the Roguelike typically has randomly generated dungeons, and as a result doesn't deliver on discovery nearly as well. Will the perilous Mount Grimrock survive scrutiny?
Grimrock uses real time in all of its systems. Fighting snails? Real time. Staring at a puzzle? Real time. Inventory sitting open while you brew potions? Hope you're watching for ogres. All of this plays into the game's food system, a hunger gauge that declines in, you guessed it, real time. When a character's hunger gauge dips very low, that character stops regenerating health and energy, leaving life far more difficult for the party. Food is fairly scarce, encouraging the player to either explore for food or rush the dungeon.
Rushing through the halls of Grimrock will get you killed, both in the short and long term. In the short term, pit traps and poison traps will put you into undesirable situations (oh god, so many cave slimes), while the long term will leave you starving and underprepared to face the growing dangers of the mountain. This game is an excellent example of how to make player exploration feel rewarding and necessary. Rather than giving you what you need on the beaten path, like most games of the day, most good items are tucked away in the mountain's many secret areas, rewarding the player for careful consideration of clues and powers of observation. Several of these come down to "find the button", but overall the exploration is rewarding and exciting.
One less exciting aspect of the game is the combat. With the real time exploration comes real time combat, wherein you right click a given character's weapon to attack with it whenever it's off cooldown. You can either whale away the instant each weapon is available for use (boring but practical) or interrupt your opponent's attacks with your own, robbing the monster of their damage (the interesting way). The problem with this system is that you can just move into a different grid space after attacking, and the enemy monster will just move to follow you, devolving the combat into a short round of strafe attacking followed by a dead enemy. The few attempts to break this pattern up involve lots of monsters flanking you, but each of these situations (except the final boss, who is annoying for an entirely different reason) involves either finding a bottleneck or dying horribly. These combat gripes could have been easily solved by allowing the enemy an "attack of opportunity" whenever you attempted to move out of combat with it.
The music is... well, other than the title theme (and another version of the title theme in the end credits), there is no music. This is definitely not a minus, however, because you will be busy listening for monsters, opening doors, closing pit traps, and various other excellently placed audio cues to clue you into the goings on of the dungeon. This minimalistic use of sound was an excellent design choice and greatly helps the game's immersion.
The story is sparse, but effective. At the start, your nameless protagonists are cast into the mountain to be forgotten, but writing on the walls shows the presence of an intelligent designer. Over time you are beckoned by a mysterious voice in your dreams to an escape route at the bottom of the dungeon, and even begin to find notes from a previous delver named Toorum. A clear influence from EA's The Immortal shows, and the lack of direct interaction contributes to a growing feeling of paranoia and helplessness.
Genres don't die, they just evolve. That's the message Grimrock delivers to us. Almost Human have taken a genre thought dead for good, applied modern technology to it, and ended up with a product that delivers fully on a set of aesthetics no other game has for well over a decade. While this game gives by no means a perfect embodiment of the genre, its execution leaves me confident that the genre can continue to evolve.
Verdict: B+
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