This room is the pits! Ha ha! <cough> Sorry.
Four criminals are taken to the top of Grimrock Mountain, given a pardon, and then thrown down into the ancient tunnels inside. If they can survive, they are free. But that’s a big if. With only their wits and what they can find in the dungeon, they must find a way to escape or die in the depths of the mountain, like so many before them.
Legend of Grimrock is a dungeon crawling RPG which draws on classic games of the genre but manages at the same time to be modern and original. Gameplay works on a cell-based system, with players moving at right angles on a grid in real time, including during combat. It’s a dungeon crawl to the core: there are no shops, no bartering, no NPCs you need to talk to, and no quests. The only task is to survive and escape the dungeon, making goals simple. Puzzle solving and secret hunting are core elements of the game, and do an excellent job of breaking up surprisingly challenging and intense fights with various underground denizens.
As the game opens, players are given the option of creating their own party, or starting with the default four characters. There are four races, each with unique strengths, weaknesses and perks, as well as three classes, each with unique skills. Any combination of characters can work, though choosing all the same race and class can limit your options. Stat points are distributed at creation, and can only be improved through skills during the game. Combat style is determined by the types of characters in your party: lots of melee characters will have you fighting up close, while mages usually do best at a distance, and rogues mix ranges well, but favour lots of maneuvering.
You will come to hate these things.
Puzzles make up an important part of the game. Many need to be solved to proceed, though there are far more which are optional, but yield the best items in the game. There’s an entire floor of the dungeon which can easily be bypassed, but solving it gets you some really nice equipment. Clues and solutions to the puzzles I found to be generally logical, though I was stumped a few times. (Ok, I admit it; I looked at a walkthough a few times when I got really stuck. A few times I felt dumb for not figuring it out, and once the answer was one I felt I never would have arrived at.) Better to have puzzles be more challenging than overly simple though. Solving the puzzles, finding secrets, and getting fancy items is surprisingly rewarding.
Dwindling food supplies, torches burning out, poison, disease, and the need to find someplace safe to sleep must be addressed by the player. Each character can only carry a certain amount of supplies as well, or they will get slowed (which slows the movement of the entire party, and consumes extra food) or even overburdened to the point they cannot move. Picking up heavy things just before a monster attack can be fatal, as I discovered. There’s also a hard core mode, where you have to draw your own map, on paper, outside the game. You get a compass in game, but still. Still! Anyone who actually did this has my respect.
Maybe potions will solve this! (Spoilers: they won’t.)
Legend of Grimrock manages to stay fresh throughout. New monsters, magic, items, dungeon scenery, and puzzles are presented at regular intervals, so it never feels repetitive. No grinding in this game. Each combat can easily be fatal too, if you get complacent. (Many are, even if you aren’t.) So save often! Furthermore, there’s an engaging plot, and more to the dungeon than it at first seems. I’d love to say more, but half the fun of the game is the element of discovery, so I’ll leave it at that.
I highly recommend this game. Steam says I’ve played over 30 hours already, which should speaks volumes about its quality. This is easily one of the best RPGs in recent memory, and for only $15! Legend of Grimrock should be on every RPG fan’s list.
Could someone send me a saved game file for after level 5..I give up on that but do love the game send to [email protected]
thanks
Hey, thanks!
It’s not a very demanding game to begin with (compared to something like Crysis or Battlefield), and you can definitely cut down the graphics if you need to. On my machine, it runs at about 640mb RAM at full graphics, and 350 or so at minimum specs. Only takes about 10% of my processor either way too. So I’d think you should be ok.
Excellent review. I knew nothing about this game and am now super jazzed. One question though, my PC is not exactly built for gaming (simulated graphics card) so how hard does this game push a PC? Are there any options to dull down the graphics so that I can actually play?
I won this game in a contest when it first came out and I was surprised to see that even with my simulated graphics I could play it decently. I have all the options put down to the lowest and it plays, not amazingly, but at about 19-23 FPS.
So yes, you SHOULD be able to play it but it won’t look good and it won’t run at 100% speed.