Legend of Grimrock

Legend of Grimrock is a landmark release in Indie RPGs. Not only did it bring back dungeon crawlers/blobbers into the limelight, its success also showed that gamers wanted some of the old school RPGs. Without this, I'm not sure that Divinity Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity would have gotten the same success. It was also made by a small development team with no AAA-studio behind it, so it's also part of the indie takeover of Steam that pretty much changed how games were distributed and made. So while it's definitely got historical significance, is it actually good?

There isn't that much of a story to Legend of Grimrock. You are a band of prisoners and you need to escape Mount Grimrock. You start off with no equipment which you eventually find some to make your party better than useless. As you waddle between simple puzzles, you fight off your first enemies all the way to the end of the first level. As you progress further the challenges picks up with tougher enemies and puzzles, and this formula does get repeated until the end of the game (with 13 levels in total). The movement is grid based and very much inspired by classic blobbers like Wizardy, Might & Magic and Bard's Tale as every move brings you a screen forward. The game works in real-time, so for example if you are browsing your equipment or trying to figure out what to level up in your characters, you might get randomly attacked by an enemy you didn't see. On paper this is all very fun and great, but the game does have certain flaws:

1) The AI of enemies leaves a little to be desired. After doing the first few levels, you eventually realize that the best technique to kill enemies is to run around in circles around them. You lure them into an open space, and you just have to move from grid to grid, land a cheap shot, and keep doing so and you will take no damage. I think this is where the real-time aspect takes away from the game. A pure turn-based battle system would have been more tactical in battles, but here it almost feels like an action RPG while doing this technique and just requires to hit the right keys at the right time. There's a few instances where there are too many enemies to perform this (or tight quarters), but 90% of the battles can be won this way

2) The Puzzles. Oh my god. Like at first it's not too bad having to find a little hidden button in a wall, but as you profess they become much harder and the hints are vague and don't really tell much. I wouldn't mind if these puzzles were just for hidden loot, but there's so many of them that block the main path of the game and you can't go further if you don't figure them out. I eventually settled with a walkthrough (which I tend to avoid), it was either that or just quit the game altogether. It's definitely a flaw to have so many unintuitive puzzles blocking the way

3) Lack of depth in the system. When you level up, you get 4 points which you can attribute in your 6 class-based attributes. For example you will put points in Swords for your fighter, and points in Fire Magic for your mage. Each class has his own sets, and when you reach a certain number you will unlock new abilities. Aside from the spells, everything is activated automatically when attacking. It doesn't take long to realize that this is not a deep RPG system and it's pretty barebones/basic. The equipment is also very minimal, there' only about 3-4 versions of Swords/Maces/Axes and you'll never really have any hard decision to make on what to equip. There is no shop, so it's pretty much just getting what you find in the dungeon.

One of the better aspects of the game is the trial and error. You have to save often and you are going to die a lot. A lot of areas you'll re-do over and over until you get the right sequence of things and I thought that was pretty fun, that was one aspect here that I had the feeling of old school RPGs. The dungeons are mostly fun to explore (until you get one of those stupid blocking puzzles of course) and it does mostly well in that aspect at reviving the dungeon exploring aspect. While trying to ignore its flaws, I had some fun with the game but about halfway through you realize that it's indeed an indie team that did this and they probably didn't have all the resources they needed to make the game as complete as they wanted. It's certainly not one of the greatest games in the genre, and while it has some pretty good reviews on release, I can definitely see why all-time RPG lists are not including this one in them. A good Dungeon Crawler yes, but you will have to go back to the 90s for the best of them.

The first levels are thrilling. It was my childhood's "Eye of the Beholder" all over again, oh boy! Then the flaws started to creep out.

First, as you progress you'll find out that dancing around is a necessity to survive battles. No matter how good your builds are, you characters just can't take hits. That's so hugely silly. Just picture that party of four misfits madly sidestepping around.

Which brings us to the stats system. Some attributes' effects are nonsensical and unbalanced. As a result, optimal builds are ridiculous. End game heavy armor on a minotaur will never equal in survivability to puny rogue with evade investement. Heavy axes never equal the devastating power of thrown weapons on a minotaur with nil investment in dexterity.

Lastly, the puzzles are obtuse, arbitrary and frustrating.