Legend of Grimrock

Yes I am back. I was away in Iceland and then Disneyworld and I have been recovering… with Legend of Grimrock. Yes, this post is about video games – I’ll make it quick.

Grimrock is possibly the most classical fix out there for someone looking to recapture an old-school D&D vibe, with the benefits of being playable solo, having oodles of puzzles, traps and goodies, and being old-school frustrating hard at times. I can’t pretend to have been around for the really old generation of brutal games, whether broken pen-and-paper ones or cruel video games (although I have played a fair bit of Paper Mario, which can get pretty ugly without an IGN walkthrough to hold your hand).

I got Grimrock during the Steam Summer Sale, along with acquiring a PC copy of Dragon Age: Origins (my PS3 version felt lacking and I heard the PC game was much better – which is true) and Brave New World for Civilization V. While Grimrock is the one I have played the least so far, it is certainly the most intriguing (the other two being, after all, essentially replays of an old favourite). I have not played a good RPG puzzle-solver with this much classic aesthetic in some time, and it is very satisfying when you find the solution without help (although occasionally I seek out hints – only twice now!)

However, I do have one bane – being only at the third floor. Spiders. I am quite content to fight spiders in other games – World of Warcraft spiders, Dragon Age spiders. They’re all fine. I even used spiders to terrify a member of my D&D group – our hulking dragonborn paladin, who is played by a very arachnophobic gentleman. Yet Grimrock spiders are teaching me a painful lesson, one which probably has some karma behind it (although may in any case just make me appreciate their power in terrorizing players more). The Grimrock spiders are silent demons. They ambush me from behind as I try to determine where the scuttling bastards have gotten to in dark hallways, and they sink horrible screeching fangs into my characters, who no longer have any antivenoms and have to rest after each ambush to avoid dying from poison. So far, I am usually fine against one spider while my party is at full health, but once spider number two arrives with the rest of the cavalry, I’m, to be frank, fucked. Caught in the web, as it were. The spiders corner me as I try to strafe around them, lick their fangs and dig in as I holler and weep. It is agonizing progression, possibly made worse by my preference for playing RPGs as once-removed versions of eponymous character roles: my Insectoid mage has yet to find a scroll for an air spell (which is his prime specialty), while everyone else feebly swings their little weapons and chug potions. It’s pretty desperate. We shall see if it improves with time.