While playing Grime, there are a couple of things that you’ll notice almost right away. One is that the developers at Clover Bite have definitely played Dark Souls, if not more than a few of its copycats, as they’ve crafted an action-adventure RPG that’s also steeped in punishing combat mechanics and doom-laden atmosphere, as well as beholden to a generally similar interface design. This is hardly the first and certainly will not be the last game to transplant such a style onto a 2D Metroid-esque world, where you encounter paths that are insurmountable until you later return with the right upgrade.
You’ll also realize that Grime wants parrying to spill out of you like an instinct, to the point where the game almost damns itself to tedium as it preaches its gospel of hitting the button right when an attack lands in order to shrug it off. Your wordless protagonist may be capable of swinging weapons made from things like bones and fingers, but your most powerful initial weapon is the result of a successful parry: You decimate an enemy’s health bar and absorb them into the black hole head that sits (or is it floats?) atop your stony human-shaped body.
The usual attacks and dodge moves drain stamina even more quickly than is typical of methodical, Dark Souls-inspired combat, with the protagonist hardly beefed up enough at the outset to do more than slowly chip away at red health bar segments that disappear entirely if you parry instead. Furthermore, parry attempts demand no stamina, and absorbing enemies has even further benefits: For a while, it’s the only way to restore your healing ability, and only by absorbing enough of each enemy do you unlock purchasable traits to expand your abilities. Tellingly, one of the earliest traits reduces the damage you take upon flubbing a parry.
Grime is not, after all, totally unreasonable, even if it’s quite demanding. As you move beyond the parrying boot camp of its (admittedly somewhat tiresome) opening hours, the game opens itself up. Players acquire a greater variety of weapons and ways to restore their health, and further traits result in additional playstyles that will let you, for example, restore stamina when an enemy strikes the shadow that you briefly leave behind after a dodge.
Death, despite happening with a similar frequency to Grime’s contemporaries, is markedly less punishing here, sending you back to a respawn point and resurrecting all the enemies as expected but letting you keep your currency rather than attaching it to your previous, now-discarded “vessel.” Instead, you lose the combo points gained by parrying and not taking damage, which increase the currency you gain. There’s less of the usual spiral where losing begets more losing, as your old vessel even becomes a stationary, single-use healing object that you can hit in the midst of a tough battle, either strategically or accidentally.
Most impressive of all is the game’s world, a desolate and sometimes darkly humorous place that revels in the grotesque, where limbs, teeth, and eyeballs grossly sprout from weird places. It’s a realm of failure, full of misshapen rock people who bemoan the sentience they never asked for. The spindly and the big-headed alike are envious (sometimes violently) of you: a specimen of inarguable proportion, shape, and intent that they’ve been told they might achieve one day through endless toil. To them, having emerged fully formed, you’re a cheat. To others, you’re an object of fervent worship, and to others still you’re a terrifying force since your actions consist entirely of tearing through creatures that even the menus label “prey.”
Further glimpses into this breathtaking universe are often reward enough for exploring the game’s multitude of alternate paths, but even Grime’s level design is surprising for featuring a world much larger and more complex than it appears as you discover involved platforming challenges and optional bosses. Though Grime emerges into an almost comically overcrowded genre, its initial familiarity and rigidity belie a world of intricate and formidable imagination.
The game was reviewed using a code provided by Akupara Games.
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