Developer: Spicy Horse
Publisher: Turner Boardcasting System
Rrp: £6.39 (for all 3 seasons), £2.39 (per season) or £0.79 (per episode)
Released: 31st July 2008
Available on Steam, Gog.com and their own website
Played Using: Mouse & Keyboard
Brainchild of American McGee (the man who brought you Alice) Grimm is a game, or series of games, about retelling the old fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
In a way Grimm plays something like Katamari Damacy in that you must build up to the point where you can accomplish your goal, however unlike Katamari Damacy you aren’t gathering up things into a ball but rather corrupting the world around you instead.
Corrupting the world is a simple affair, just move and everything within a certain radius becomes corrupted, the more you corrupt the wider the radius of corruption becomes along with its ability to corrupt things that you couldn’t before.
Of course it’s not entirely that simple, the creatures and people of the story can purify a area you’ve corrupted, once you’ve gained enough corruption power you can stop them entirely by changing them too.
Grimm only has two moves in his arsenal… And I hesitate to call one of them a move really. The first and the most used is buttstomp, you perform this by pressing jump as you are in the air. It’ll stun anything that is trying to clean a corrupted area and also creates a small shockwave of corruption, perfect for those hard to reach places.
The second ability is peeing, it doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t) but if Grimm’s pee can reach a spot so can he, to use this ‘ability’ simply stand still, Grimm will start to pee and then click jump…that’s it.
Each episode has two versions of the same story, the first to come is a the ‘light’ telling of the story which gives a very watered down and child friendly version of the story. The second is the ‘dark’ version, this is given on completion of the episode and is much closer to the original story from the Brothers Grimm collection. Both of these versions are narrated and commented on by Grimm who clearly has a penchant for the darker side of things. Something that I found fairly clever was that the colour palette of the main menu changes to become darker once the episode is completed.
Episodes are split into six levels or scenes. At the end of each scene you are given a display showing the time it took to complete the level, what secrets you’ve uncovered and a gold star (assuming that you corrupted everything in that level).
Much like TellTales Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us, Grimm is made of a series of short episodes. At the time of release one episode would be released every week and would last approximately half an hour. The thing is that Telltales games don’t require you to exit the game entirely to select the next episode, unless your changing seasons, Grimm however does since each episode is essentially a small game unto itself.
Do I recommend Grimm? No, not really. The idea is intriguing but it’s just so damn repetitive. Yes, the individual stories change but the gameplay itself remains the same. The best part of the entire game is getting to listen to Grimm retell the story when you complete it, but to be honest it’s not enough of a reward for that repetitive gameplay. Plus I’m sure you could just find the ending on youtube and get the story, it’s not like you have any real agency in this game the ending remains the same no matter what you do.
If you really want to try it out by all means do, the first episode is completely free just remember what you get in that episode is just rinsed and repeated in the other twenty three after it.
