Legend of Grimrock

I love the immersion - the environments, the puzzles, the other-wordly-ness of the dungeon. But the problems come from a few odd choices. The combat never quite felt "right" to me. It's still really weird to have real-time combat in a grid-based system, and while it serves OK, it just never felt natural. The big problem for me came from some of the puzzles. Most of them are great. Some require quick timing, and others some out-of-the-box thinking. But then there are *those* puzzles. Oh yes. The ones where no matter what you do, there's no way you will guess the solutions on your own. The ones where the switch is hidden two rooms over on an inconspicuous bit of wall that the only reason you would check is because you know you have to look at every wall to check for hidden switches. But then there is the 9th floor temple puzzle. This one is a doozy and almost got be to completely stop playing in "You've got to be kidding me" frustration. MINOR SPOILERS It requires 4 items, exactly NONE of which you are required to be carrying. So even if you manage to guess the answer to the 4 riddles facing you, unless you either A) happen to be carrying all 4 items or B) remember exactly where you left them, you will be in for a lot of needless backtracking and pixel-hunting. I was carrying 2 of the 4 items, and thankfully remembered where there were 2 of the others, but if I hadn't remembered AND hadn't used a guide to see the answers to the riddles, I would have quit right then and there. I still give this a recommendation, but would strongly suggest you use a guide and/or make notes whenever you drop an item, since it could come back to bite you later.

Yesterday I downloaded and installed Legend of Grimrock. I could only play a couple of hours (more than I planned), but so far I'm impressed. The game puts four naked prisoners in a dungeon, who want to escape the place. There are four races (human, minotaur, lizardman, insectoid), three classes (fighter, mage, rogue), and a couple of skills and traits that you can use to build your character. You have to take care of your resources (equipment, food, light sources), solve puzzles, find secret doors, fight vicious enemies and gather experience to survive. The dungeon walls can get monotonous (and you're going to check them out often, looking for secret doors), but I always found something, that made the dungeon interesting enough, to continue your exploration. Fighting is a bit hard at first, since you can only strafe and turn in 90 degrees, but so does your enemies. Spell casting requires power and entering the correct combination of runes. The developers told us, that the game is a spiritual successor of Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master games - and they're right, it captures the feeling of old-school first person dungeon crawler games very well. But even if you put your nostalgia away, Grimrock is an entertaining and beautiful game.

I rarely play these kind of RPGs, but after playing this, I want to find others just like it. I am surprised how addicted I got playing this game. I've been playing it since I got it today and can't stop playing it! I just love searching for secrets. I felt like I found them all in the first 4 levels so far, but I had to go back up the stairs from level 3 to get something and I found one that I missed! Great fun so far and if you are thinking of getting it also, what you see the videos and trailers is what you get, so if you think you won't like it after seeing those, you probably won't, but for myself, after watching the trailer I had to get it! Who here is playing with old school mode on and using a pen and paper? :) I'm getting soooo lost!

I've only played fifteen minutes of the game so can't give a fair rating but wanted to comment here that I managed the get the game running smoothly on my rig: AMD Athlon 2400+ Single Core SSE 1 Gig DDR RAM Win XP SP3 32-bit nVidia GeForce 7300 GT 512MB My video options in-game were: 1024x768 Textures Medium Texture Filtering Low Shadows Low and the final option completely off (some fancy graphics feature) The rest I left at default.

Legend of Grimrock is quite a minimalistic game. Both in the size of the team who made the game and in the numbers of activities you can do in it. Actually, I think that you can count them on the fingers of both of your hands. And yet it is addictive and fun to play. How is that possible? After you have created your party/chose the default one consisting of four prisoners, you begin exploring the first level. After a while, you kill your first enemy and gather your first equipment. Your party begin to be hungry. The torch goes off. You need to find some food and a new torch. In addition to that, you will have to solve puzzles. On occasion, you may find a hidden button which will reveal hidden room containing more loot . Mages can learn new spells from scrolls they find. Torches might be replaced by other sources of light. The game is not too hard, nor too easy. If you make a mistake, you will get punished, but rarely by immediate death. The story is clear from the start. There are notes here and there, left by a prisoner who was here before you, about Mount Grimrock, the dungeon you are trying to escape from. The game looks good, but you won’t see many things. The environment changes as you descend deeper into the dungeon, but we are talking about three environment types. There aren’t many types of enemies either. Although Legend of Grimrock is mostly pretty flawless game, there are some minor issues. In lager areas, you can use the movement between tiles in your advantage in combats by using the hit & run tactic, although I have a feeling that it was designed this way on purpose. There are no shortcuts for spells, unfortunately. You have to click on every symbol every time you cast a spell. Some spells consists of three symbols, so casting spells can get a bit slow sometimes. The biggest issue are some puzzles which can be maddening. Luckily, there are guides on the internet on how to solve them.