Rating of
4.5/5
It’s Been a Long Time, Dungeon
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 05/11/12
20 years ago, I fell in love with first-person dungeon-crawling RPGs. I can’t remember if it was “Dungeon Master,” of which I played the SNES port, or one of the ‘Eye of the Beholder’ trilogy for DOS that captured my interest, but I played the Hell out of every one that I could get to work. I loved this particular flavor of Action-RPG, regardless of platform. Looking back, I think what I enjoyed so much about them was their Adventure aspects, not their Action aspects, which allowed these games fill a unique niche that I have recently come to call “Adventure-RPG.” In the years since I played those old games, the first-person perspective has come to dominate gaming, while Adventure aspects have been completely consumed by button-mashing Action. Modern first-person games that are marketed as RPGs don’t really feel like RPGs, but like First-Person Shooters or something else entirely. I have an appreciation for these games, things like ‘The Elder Scrolls’ series, but they never really scratched the same itch as old favorites like “Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep,” or “Stonekeep.” So when I saw the news that an Indie development team called Almost Human was making “Legend of Grimrock” (“LoG”), a true spiritual successor to “Dungeon Master,” I almost lost it. After 17 years of waiting, someone was actually making my kind of first-person RPG again.
Presentation
Graphically, “LoG” is simple but effective, and has successfully made the jump from 2D sprites to 3D polygons, actually providing significantly more feedback to the player through visible and audible cues than its ancestors ever did. The user interface is also much more streamlined and uses a lot of overlays, allowing the entire screen to be filled with dungeon. The vast majority of things players will find themselves looking at are dungeon walls. These walls look good, with a variety of different tiles to keep things from becoming monotonous and textures that change the deeper the player delves into the dungeon (a la “Dungeon Hack”). The other things players will commonly find themselves looking at are monsters. The number of enemies is fairly limited (about 11 different types), but each is an original model with no pallet-swapping, and all are well-animated within the game’s rigid movement system. Lighting is another important aspect of the game’s visuals, and it is handled well, as the player’s characters can carry torches or use magic to light their way while a variety of dungeon features and enemies cast their own ambient light. I was able to run “LoG” with High graphics settings on a GeForce GT 330M, and everything looked clean and jaggy free.
The only disappointing aspect of “LoG’s” presentation is its soundtrack… or rather its almost complete lack of one. While dungeon exploration RPGs like this have usually been pretty quiet, I have a particular fondness for the quirky tunes that would trigger in the original “Dungeon Master” at the beginning of a puzzle. In place of music, “LoG” features some interesting ambient noises, such as the distant bellows of unhappy creatures, and a few weird techno sounds that might be an attempt at music.
However, in many cases, utilizing a soundtrack might actually interfere with the player’s ability to solve the game’s many puzzles, as secret doors, moving panels, pit covers, and teleporters all make distinct noises that can be heard from a distance. While it would definitely hinder a hard-of-hearing or deaf player, I found these aural hints to be incredibly immersive, adding another layer complexity to the tried-and-true formula of dungeon exploration.
Story
The titular Grimrock is an enormous mountain. Within this mountain lies an ancient dungeon whose origins have been lost to the mists of time. The current king uses the dungeon as a convenient means of getting rid of criminals: Groups of four prisoners are transported to the top of Mt. Grimrock via airship, chained-together, and – as they are pushed down a pit into the dungeon – absolved of their crimes. Now all they need to do is survive the dungeon’s trials and make it to the bottom alive… a task that has never been performed by anyone.
As the prisoners, who are custom-created characters with no individual backstories or personalities (quite disappointing), make their way through the upper caverns of Mt. Grimrock, they are contacted telepathically in their sleep by a mysterious Voice. This Voice claims to be another prisoner in the mountain and is convinced that teaming up with the player’s characters will allow them all to escape. Further exploration reveals a trail of handwritten notes left by a person named Toorum (obviously a reference to Torham Zed from “Dungeon Master II”).
Does the Voice belong to Toorum? Will the characters be able to survive the trials of the dungeon and stave off starvation long enough to meet their mysterious friend? Will they really be able to escape? Will they really be granted their freedom at the bottom of the mountain?
The narrative in “LoG” is weak, but the sense of mystery is strong. This is not the type of game one should play to watch an entertaining story, but the type of game one should play to revel in the sense of the unknown.
Gameplay
“LoG” stays true to its roots in the most important ways. Movement is grid-based, allowing the party of four characters and enemies (who sometimes form parties and sometimes act singularly) to move one-square-at-a-time in any of the four cardinal directions in real time. Thanks to the fancy graphics engine, it is quite easy to see enemies in nearby squares, making it convenient to strafe around them and avoid their attacks. While the default movement settings have the directions assigned to WASD and turning assigned to QE on the keyboard, there are options to remap all of the keys and even to turn-on an old-school piece of user interface that features clickable movement buttons. Combat works the same way it used to, with clickable weapon icons on each character’s portrait that operate on a cooldown system and spellcasting via a set of 9 clickable runes that need to be used in specific combinations.
I actually started playing the game using the default mouse and keyboard configuration, but it was too cumbersome to manage while sitting in my gaming chair in front of my TV, so I setup an Xpadder profile for “LoG” that ended up working pretty well. And the fact that it only worked ‘pretty well’ leads to one of the few problems I had with “LoG:” Unlike many modern Indie games, it’s not controller enabled. While it works perfectly to use the left-stick on a controller for movement and the shoulder buttons for turning (just like “Dungeon Master” on the SNES with its ‘move mode’), using the right-stick for cursor movement and the triggers for mouse clicks is kind of sloppy and makes it a pain to right-click quickly on the center of weapon icons to attack with them. The best solution would be for Almost Human to simply issue a patch that allows attacking with each character’s default (right hand) weapon to be assigned to a hotkey, which would then allow anyone who wants to use a controller to use something like Xpadder to assign each character to one of the four face buttons found on most modern controllers.
The gameplay in “LoG” consists entirely of solving puzzles and fighting monsters. The puzzles are incredible, requiring observation, listening, quick movement, and quick wits to complete, as the characters manipulate a variety of levers, buttons, and pressure plates. None of them are ridiculously obscure – a problem that befell almost every old Adventure game – but there are plenty of optional ‘secret’ puzzles that can be missed by players who aren’t paying close attention.
The combat, on the other hand, is a bit rough around the edges. Both the player’s characters and enemies deal shockingly random amounts of damage, sometime as little as 2 points, sometimes as much as 70+ points. This inconsistent damage makes combat essentially a function of chance – there isn’t a lot of strategy involved, just a lot of running in circles, hoping to get more high-damage hits than the enemy. Even stranger, wearing armor doesn’t seem to do a whole lot to protect characters from damage, making Evasion a much more reliable and viable statistic. This type of game has always presented difficulties in fighting more than one group of enemies at a time (even if they are multiple groups of one), as the characters can only attack what’s in front of them. Being surrounded by two or more enemy groups is essentially a death sentence (reload that last save!), which would be fine if the game always presented one group of enemies at a time. However there are three or four areas in “LoG” that throw the player’s characters into desperate situations in which they are trapped in a room with four or more enemy groups, making strategic movement impossible (too crowded).
The combat issue can be fixed by playing the game on ‘Easy’ difficulty, which doesn’t change any of the puzzles, but the difficulty can’t be changed once the game has started. Of course, there is also a ‘Hard’ difficulty for those who REALLY like reloading constantly, and even an ‘Old-School’ mode that disables the game’s automap (why anyone would want to disable a wonderful feature that has been part of almost every classic game of this type is beyond me).
The leveling system in “LoG” is where it moves furthest away from its predecessors, and the game suffers for it. Instead of a D&D-style system (like “Eye of the Beholder”) or an organic system where using skills makes them better (like “Dungeon Master”), “LoG” allows characters to choose from three classes (the highly-original Fighter, Thief, and Mage) and four races (the actually-highly-original Human, Minotaur, Lizardman, and Insectoid), pick two unchangeable traits for each character upon creation, and assign 4 skill points per level across 6 class-specific skills. The Fighter skills are Athletics, Armor, Axes, Maces, Swords, and Unarmed Combat; the Thief Skills are Assassination, Daggers, Dodge, Ranged Weapons, Thrown Weapons, and Unarmed Combat; and the Mage skills are Air Magic, Earth Magic, Fire Magic, Ice Magic, Spellcraft, and Staff Defense. Six categories are just too many, as these categories split-up too many useful skills that should all be under one umbrella. Why can’t a Fighter specialize in ranged attacks? Why can’t a Thief be Athletic? Why must a Mage focus on one element to have any hope of learning useful spells? Why can’t anyone cast healing spells instead of making potions out of a severely-limited number of herbs scattered throughout the dungeon?
Despite its few flaws, “LoG” is an impressive and enjoyable game. But it gets better: Almost Human will soon be releasing a creation kit for the game, allowing them and anyone else to create all-new dungeons for players to explore. If they can fix the issues with the combat and patch-in some different options for the leveling system, Almost Human stands ready to make “LoG” the game that old titles like “Dungeon Hack” and “Unlimited Adventures” tried – and failed – to be: a source of endless exploration.
Overall
“Legend of Grimrock” is a triumphant return of classic gameplay elements with a dose of modern refinement. The excellent puzzles and dungeon layout are marred only by unnecessarily-difficult combat and a constraining leveling system. For anyone who enjoyed the old games from which “LoG” draws its inspiration, this is a must-buy. For those who have never experienced a real first-person dungeon-crawl, “LoG” is a great place to start.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 4.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4.5/5
