GRIM AND BEAR IT FOR A HIT OF 90s NOSTALGIA
OF ALL the helpful things you could think of to bring to a gun fight, a badger might not be at the top of your list. But what if that badger was heavily armed?
Cue Grimshade, a 90s-inspired JRPG-ish fantasy adventure, which started life as a kickstarter project by indie studio Talerock.
Set in the world of Ree’fah, it tells the tale of a group of fantastical heroes fighting for the future of their home, in some of the trickiest battles I’ve ever fought in.
Looks wise, this is a steampunk gem – beautifully realised environments that have been hand-drawn to add depth, sprites
that flit smoothly across the screen, and a surprising level of detail on every new screen.
Grimshade could have been plucked straight from the 90s, which is handy, as that’s exactly what Talerock was aiming for.
You start the game with just two characters, Alister Garuda, and Kiba, a young boy Alister found abandoned in a dark forest, surrounded by dead bodies.
Combat runs on a turn-based system, and is tactical. You soon learn that if you’re continually getting splattered, it’s because you’re coming at a fight all wrong.
With just two of you, the initial battles are a bit of a slog, even when I set the game’s difficulty to normal, I still found it a struggle at times to fight off the first few villains and monsters.
As you add to your merry band, combat gets a tad more interesting, as new characters add new skills to the mix – including Charlie the badger, a retired mercenary who is as tough as old boots, and twice as cute.
You can change up your battles by earning new abilities for your characters – and that seems to take forever, almost an hour and a half for me to gain a single new ability for just one of my merry band.
The environments are stuffed to the gills with items and hidden objects, the problem is you’re never sure what is useful, and what isn’t.
The decisions you make dictate how successful you are.
For instance, during one battle where the town is under attack, you have to decide whether to reinforce the military defending the town – and be rewarded with an item for use at a later date, or simply ignore the pleas for help and continue with your own quest.
That decision will lead to the deaths of many townspeople, and you will be universally resented for your inaction.
Dialogue, which at the beginning is quite charming, begins to wear a little thin as the game plays out.
That’s a problem, as the further you progress in the game, the more important it becomes to pay attention to the dialogue screen.
The lack of a chatlog to revisit dialogue doesn’t help either, as if you do miss something, you end up wandering aimlessly around the map in the hope of triggering the next action.
I don’t think it would have been quite so annoying if the plot had been kept nice and simple, but Grimshade’s storyline becomes so overly convoluted that you begin to not really care about the characters or their quest.
This is Talerock’s first game as a studio, and you can’t fault the creativity, ambition, and sheer love that you can see has clearly been poured into Grimshade.
But less is more, and I can’t help feeling a simpler narrative would have made the world of difference to, what at its core, is a fantastic little game.
■ BUY IT: £15.99 from store. steampowered.com