GRIME

Playing Grime for the first time was very memorable. I wrote a lot of notes for this game when I was playing, so I won't waste any time to not make this longer than it already is. Boss Design. To explain the bosses I will have to do a brief explanation of the basic combat. Most of it is what you expect, the main standout is the parry system. when you parry you do damage, except if an attack is red, or the HP bar of the enemy is grey. and the bosses and enemies have segments of their HP that are different colors. If you successfully parry an enemy it will do all of the red part of the HP until it reaches a grey part. And if there is no grey part, then you one shot the enemy. For bosses it just does a set amount of damage if the hp bar is currently red. As for the bosses themselves, I think they are great. Not the greatest of all time, of course, but still far better than you would expect. They have a great use of space. what I mean by that is area control. So if you have an attack that covers the floor with a hazard for a second, the player will jump. And if the next attack in the chain is a dashing slash upwards, the player will dash through the boss. Now there are a lot of ways or examples for this. my point with this is that to successfully avoid damage the boss and the player will move into different spots than they ended up. and you will then get an opening at the end or sometimes in the middle of a chain of attacks. now lots of great 2d platformer bosses do something, it is a tried and true formula. but with the pull ability I talked about earlier they get very creative with it. My complaint is that some of the fights are reskins of each other. I think they are handled a lot better than other games but still. one of the recurring mini bosses are the rock giants. I believe there are 4 in the game. And they do each have different moves and timings, but they still do feel quite dull. Except for one of them, the giant of eyes. they have a phase 2 and a sword which does meaningfully make the fight feel unique. but it still does feel like a shame, at least to me, because they have the same model. There is also 2 vulture fights and 2 amalgam fights. And they are so wildly different in attacks and gimmicks they are effectively new bosses altogether, rather than a harder version of the original. I'm very glad I tried out the new game plus for Grime, because the new game plus changes the bosses a lot. It's basically like new bosses altogether. some have new attacks, mechanics, or even new phases. Not to mention there is a really cool boss only in new game plus (but I won't spoil). Which all really helps for making the game still feel difficult. Because in most new game plus modes, the game just tweaks the damage and health of enemies. And those are important to do, but only doing that makes it boring. This is a metroidvania so you have extra movement options that fundamentally change the fight. so even with extra damage and HP sometimes new game plus can feel easier than the originals. Suffice to say I think Grime avoids those issues with the new moves on the bosses, accounting for the added movement options. Level Design. The level design is kind of odd. I felt that the game can be slow at times, and I thought at first It was the combat. but when i thought about it more, i think its the level design. it is very big with lots of ways to get to places, similar to hollow knight, but I didn't have any problems with it in that game. then I realized it was the prevalence 3 things. First is how there are sometimes just some dead end areas without anything, like just a hallway and then that's all. it servers no purpose except to make the map look bigger and fuller. but it just makes some confusion about where to go, and checking to find if there is a secret. and paired with the darkness of some of the rooms... Second is the one way level design. now there is one times where you are meant to go somewhere and not be able to come back which is a good use of that level design. but so often the level design is very vertical or horizontal, and there are like 4 paths you can go and despite the fact that all of them lead to the same general area, when you take one of them, you have to find either a save point or a teleport spot. I find it to make exploring sometimes tedious and require me to go to the same spot just to see where the other path went, only to be the same general spot, and a piece of armor. there was no reason to make it a one way trip. Lastly, is the beacons you have to find to reveal the map. half of the time the beacon is at the very end of the area or halfway through it. and these are very big complex areas with lots of secrets. And once it was behind a hidden wall (granted it's still not too hard to find). Plus one of them is only after you beat the major story boss for the area, when you have most likely explored most of the place. I noticed those placements happened more in the early game. When you combine all these things I'm sure you can imagine how they exacerbate the problem. despite the fact the well hidden secrets is a positive in my eyes, it becomes a negative when paired with everything else. Now these issues primarily make people prone to exploring or 100 precenting metroidvanias at a disadvantage. So if you don't care too much for exploring, then it won't affect you much (though I have to wonder why you are playing a metroidvania in the first place). Story. One moment late into the game that really stuck with me was the cenotaph city. the cenotaph are the only place in the game where you are not attacked. but instead they celebrate you and their death, and it feels twisted, with the triumphant music. And they only want to be remembered after they are gone. Keep in mind this was like 20 hours into a game that I thought I knew what to expect from. it really made me wonder about the games story and instantly pulled me in. and makes me question if the player is the "bad guy". From what little I was able to parse from the lore, is that the player character is essentially doing something cruel out of mercy, something that has to be done but no one wants to do. not that there is any real "good guys" either. It makes the story feel bittersweet and still morally ambiguous in a good way. I can't say I've seen a game where the last area is a celebration before the end of the game. And for the whole point of the cenotaph to want to be remembered, I think the developers did a excellent job at making it something memorable. Conclusion. Overall I was impressed with this game, it wasn't quite what I had envisioned this game to be, in my head. I think this game is definitely worth getting. What a memorable experience this was. And I cant wait to see what my thoughts on the sequel are when i eventually play it. my final verdict: 9.0-9.1 /10. Thank you for reading.

You should play Grime NOW

It's like if Afterimage and Nine Sols had a baby, and that baby had cooler graphics

Глиномес в деле ) Наконец-то руки дошли ) Метройдвания приятная, но я её брал на сим дек, а в итоге она очень требовательная к ПК ( В целом это хорошая игра, хоть мне жутко и не понравился визуальный стиль. Денег своих стоит, но не для слабых ПК )

STOP ADDING PLATFORMING SECTIONS WHEN YOU HAVE MADE A GAME WITH QUESTIONABLY MEDIOCRE MOVEMENT MECHANICS. This should apply to your game as well as to so many other titles that, unfortunately, have picked up this horrible habit. You are NOT Hollow Knight, where the fluidity of movement makes it perfectly clear that every single mistake is entirely the player's fault. You aren't even Aeterna Noctis, which is certainly even more punishing than Hollow Knight but boasts exceptional movement mechanics where you never feel frustrated by errors that aren't objectively your own. Your game is clunky, with rigid movements. It is perfectly fine for the slow-paced gameplay you intentionally designed around, but the Abandoned Opus section has NOTHING to do with the core of your game. It is frustrating, poorly designed, and not a single time did I actually feel like I had proper input control. I'm sorry, but for me, this design choice is so fundamentally flawed and must be penalized to such a degree that it drags the game down to a failing score. Without this section, it would be a solidly passing, good game. I sincerely hope that GRIME 2 does not suffer from these exact same issues.

Эта игра буквально Blasphemous и Dead cells в одном флаконе, только с чуть более красивой графикой. Вооооот

I just spent the last two weeks or so playing GRIME and I need to talk about. I’m shocked this game doesn’t have more reviews or a larger fan following. The game isn’t perfect, to be clear, but it’s still firmly an A tier game for the designated genres. If you’re a fan of metroidvanias, 2D platformers, and souls-likes, then GRIME will undoubtedly be up your alley. That much I am sure of. I’ve read a bunch of the negative reviews on here and on other websites, and I have to say, I think most of their hate is unwarranted. This isn’t to say the game shouldn’t be criticized, because there’s definitely aspects that I have issues with. But I think it would be a huge mistake to write off the entire game just because you might’ve struggled with it in the beginning. Level design, graphics, and combat are all immense positives. The menu interface for leveling up is very simple and intuitive. It lacks the kind of polish you’d expect from a Team Cherry game, but this is a minor quibble. I must also shout out the music. There are several amazing pieces in this game—typically during epic boss fights—that deserve lots of love and praise. The overall aesthetics of this game are some of the best I’ve ever seen for a metroidvania, and I cannot recommend it enough simply on those merits. I will admit that it’s very easy to get lost in this world, and there were a few times I wished the map interface was a little more helpful in pointing things out or explaining early on what certain landmarks signified (but you can always google it, at least). Most of the problems I have with the game come down to a lack of clarity, because there are a few important things that are genuinely never explained at all. (Very From Soft coded, if you will.) Time for my BIGGEST complaint with this game, and to be clear, everything else I’ve mentioned thus far is negligible in comparison to this issue: the “pull” mechanic (orange/yellow light that you use your R stick to _pull_ objects and enemies in certain directions), is *deeply inconsistent.* I want to be clear about this because there are a few different special abilities you gain regarding the pull mechanic; one of them is concerning orange/yellow objects & enemies, while the other (much later in the game) is regarding orbs you use in the air to slingshot yourself around. The ability you use to slingshot yourself around with is totally fine and I have no problems with it. But the orange/yellow pull mechanic is going to cause a certain amount of frustration for each player, which is just very unfortunate. Perhaps the biggest example of what I mean can be found during the Misbegotten Amalgam boss fight (I’d argue it’s the hardest fight in the entire game, but your mileage may vary). There’s a part of this boss fight where you see the orange light signaling that you need to pull down on it in order to stun the boss, allowing you to get lots of punishing hits in before the next cycle of attacks. For reasons I was never able to understand THIS WAS VERY HIT OR MISS and would sometimes just straight up NOT do anything, (even if you did exactly what you’re supposed to do). _This happened to me over and over and over again, throughout the entire game regarding this mechanic._ I started to wonder if my steam deck’s right analog stick was busted or something, but no, it’s fine. It’s the pull mechanic that is fickle. So just be aware going into this game that you will probably have some inconsistency regarding this particular aspect of the game. At its worst, I was crashing out and genuinely wondering how the game got through play testing in development, but when it DID work it was fine and I thought nothing of it. (NOTE: to be EXTREMELY clear I spent *hours* of my time in this game just testing around with this pull mechanic to see if I could figure out what worked and what didn’t, and never came away with a legitimate answer. Regardless of how I moved the R stick differently, the outcomes were extremely difficult to control. I eventually beat the game so I was able to get it working at probably a 60% rate, but man, that other 40% was always super frustrating because missing those windows during boss fights means you’re going to take a lot of damage you shouldn’t.) Overall the game was a pleasant experience though, and I found the parry mechanic awesome. I built my entire character around being able to heal every time I blocked or parried an attack, and it just felt awesome (especially against bosses). To me the best boss fights were: Surrogate Vulture (my favorite by far), Giant of Eyes, and of course Shidra of the Worldpillar. I hope more people play this game and have as much fun as I did. The fact that I had such an annoying time with the pull mechanic but still came away with a very positive attitude towards my time with the game should tell you just how strong the best parts of this game are. I hope this was helpful for any prospective players. Cheers. *8/10*