In the beginning god sculpted a doll out of clay and stone. He breathed into this doll and gave it life. Thus the first man came into existence. Many cultures and underpinning belief systems have a creation story similar to this, and Israeli studio Clover Bite has based Grime’s mythology on this.
Grime bills itself as a Soulslike Metroidvania game, and as I’m very fond of both of those genres, I was hopeful, even though I’d never heard of the game before. Grime was actually released for PC, back in 2021 but has now recently been ported to consoles and a free expansion called Colors of Rot has been released in conjunction with this with a lot of new material.
Let’s start with a summary. Grime is a fun game and I enjoyed playing through it despite flaws that made me breathe heavily and sigh over and over again. That said, this is a Metroidvania game. In front of you is a huge map filled with platforming and secrets and there will be a lot of exploration into the unknown and in most cases you won’t even have unlocked the map for the area. It’s exciting to run around lost and bump into all sorts of things. Maybe you’ll find a new weapon, a new enemy type, a platforming puzzle or a hidden mini-boss? Behind every corner there is something to discover.
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Unfortunately, this is also one of the areas where the inspiration from Dark souls can go awry. While I wouldn’t say the game is bang-your-knee-to-a-drywall-hard, most people will die many times while running the game. There aren’t invincibility frames that give you breathing room after being hit by something, so if you get hit by several at once you can expect to die unforgivingly quickly. Even many enemies can do a surprising amount of damage with attacks that look relatively harmless, so in the middle of your exploration it’s not uncommon to get slaughtered despite having full health because some enemies attacked you a little too coordinated or a mini-boss was hiding in the darkness.
So now that you’ve died you come back to your surrogate who also acts as a campfire. These are sparingly deployed and when you die you can count on running through longer stretches filled with enemies and platforming. This was something that annoyed me, because being somewhere the first time is magical, but the third or fourth time it was just boring repetition. There is also a system here, where your corpse “stays put” so you can smash it. However, the developer has had the good taste to make sure that you don’t lose everything of value you picked up, but instead you get rid of an in-game currency that doesn’t matter that much. At the same time, your corpse gives you life back, which makes the next attempt easier when you catch up, so you rarely feel punished by dying.
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With the currency you never have to fear losing, you can level up and buy services and items. With your levels, you can adapt the character to your play style. If you die often, more life is good, you have a poor grasp of the stamina meter, more of it is good, and otherwise you do better damage with the type of weapon you like. In addition to this, you can also unlock traits that give you special abilities that in some cases can change your play style radically and make your play style unique to you. And there are many traits to collect and upgrade using points you get from killing mini-bosses. It always feels like you have too few of these so when you finally find a miniboss you’ll be very happy, even if it usually ends with you dying.
There is almost an attribute for every type of enemy and you get these from eating enemies. In Grime, you can parry and shoot back attacks using your head, which happens to be a black hole. This parry system is one of the foundations of the game and you are expected to use it very aggressively if you are to go far. If an enemy is damaged enough when you parry them, you gently suck them into your black hole without even saying thank you for the food. With this you get life back and get one step closer to a new upgrade. The parry system feels very good and is satisfying to pull off. As long as you’re on the ground, you can interrupt almost any action to scalp someone and open up a combo.
This black hole and your well-proportioned and shapely body is also one of the many question marks in the game. Because like many soulslike games, the story is loosely told and it’s up to you to piece together what the hell is going on. The story and mythology in the game was a highlight as there was a lot that was terribly unclear, but with the clues you got, the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. At least until the next area opened up and gave one even more questions without clear answers. Many themes are addressed such as the meaning of life and what to do when the darkness of death creeps closer. One’s character is also interesting as you are unsure of what their goals are and which side they are on. Many see one as a god, a heretic or an evil omen and you yourself refer to all your enemies as wild animals.
Thankfully, they avoid crawling into their own rectums like many other soulslike games when it comes to the story and you don’t have to watch an hour of video documentary on Youtube to understand what happened in the game. By the time the game was over I felt like I had a good handle on it and that the game assumed I could match 1+1 and didn’t need to be spoon fed everything. The world will also be praised. They have done a great job of getting a world that feels dying but built on something alive as many areas are themed body parts. But what was the absolute highlight and showed the most flaws with the game were the bosses.
The bosses in the game are difficult and will break your stone body many times over. And almost all of them carry surprises. If you want to win, you have to learn their attacks by trial and error and be cool enough to parry the crap out of them instead of panic-clicking the “jump away button.” Here, however, metroidvania and soulslike rub shoulders once again. Many of the bosses have some attacks that more or less kill you instantly that you have to be very careful about. Sometimes it happens so fast that you don’t even understand what happened or how it could hit you. Each time this happens, you need to make your way across the map again to make the next attempt against the boss.
These boss runs made me lose my mind. Often one would stand still on an elevator, climb a long ladder or run an even longer straight distance. This quickly became very boring and when you mercilessly died against the boss over and over again, you had to experience this boring transport once again. In the game in general, it was also a bit problematic to get from A to B. When you went forward it was a lot of fun, but in many metroidvania games it is even more fun to go back and unlock secrets with your new abilities. In Grime this was not the case.
Getting back through the map felt like a burden. It’s hard to put your finger on why, probably many streams are small. You move a little too slowly, there are not enough road signs, the map has to be brought up all the time to avoid getting lost, there is no help to show what you have found or missed and all fast travel is a little too far apart and on difficult places. I ended up often avoiding doing it until I felt the need to upgrade my character.
If I backtrack, as I said, there were many ways to adapt one’s playstyle. Often with a boss you can discover that your planned playstyle is rubbish and you need to rethink and think correctly. While there are ways to respect one’s character, it requires limited resources, of which it is very unclear if you will get more. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity as the game has so many possibilities, but you quickly need to lock in if you don’t want to become mediocre at everything. The game would be more fun if you could change your playstyle often, especially since one of the games’ themes is to literally remake yourself into a seemingly better version of yourself.
The game also had some bugs that were mostly harmless but some of them ruined my experience a bit. Several rewards seem to be a bit buggy and can pop up long before they are completed and some of them seem to be buggy so you can’t unlock them as their unlock ratio is 0.00%. For an achievement hunter like myself, this is disappointing. Even a bug became a huge anticlimax. I had been up half the night trying my hand at the final boss. It didn’t work so I shut down and thought to try the next day. When I started the game the next day, suddenly the boss was dying and had a monologue about his motivations before he was eaten by me. In a game where bosses are the highlight, it felt dirty that the last one was defeated by a bug.
In conclusion, Grime is like a roller coaster. When the game is good, it’s great fun and I sat up for way too long and told myself, just one more try and I’ll go to bed. And when the game is bad, it feels like studying vocabulary that gets boring. But despite my negativity, it must be pointed out with galactic proportions that the good outweighs the negative and this is a hell of a fun game for those who enjoy the genre. And it should be added that another expansion will be released for free which is rumored to have quality of life improvements, new bosses, new game+ and maybe even a new ending. The living must see.
