Crime Critic - Like a Hole in the Head

CRITICAL OF CRASS

Soulslike has been a kind enough now that we all know what it means. We can discuss details, but it usually suggests action RPG with a specific specific combat style and based on timing that does not forgive errors, associated with endurance management and a dependence of the player to develop. His skills and improve his weapons, armor and capabilities in place. a difficulty cursor.

Grime is a 2D Soulslike ARPG, or Metroidvania ... no matter what you want to call it, the game checks all the important boxes of its kind. The fight is difficult, the story is intensely opaque and the sets, the enemies and the bosses are surreal and imaginative. Grime plays variations on many themes of Software, adding complexity to mechanics and sometimes making a more obvious tribute to the Dark Souls trilogy.

With regard to the player's character, Grime makes explicit the idea of ​​life as an existential and aspiring force that derives his sense of consumption of other living beings. The player literally a black hole swirling for a head, and an important play mechanism is a movement based on the timing that replaces the familiar parade and response in Dark Souls. Make things properly and you absorb the enemy's healing respiratory energy. Missing the timing and you expose yourself to a dizzy or attack. Absorb the souls of a sufficient number of examples of a specific enemy gives you access to special capacities based on this enemy. Beat boss also gives you new useful skills, such as the opportunity to teleport yourself on the map.

These are interesting ideas with a fault, namely that the parade of the soul - or no matter how you want to call it - can be extremely difficult to time, and it is the only way to unlock these capabilities. Many bosses can only be defeated by a judicious use of mechanics, so just like learn to talk about is of crucial importance in Dark Souls, it's something you will need to practice.

Another point on the grid box is that all weapons are essentially organic and come from bones, spines, claws, teeth and pincers of enemies and bosses. You have a quick light attack and a slower or special attack slower, sometimes adding interesting movements like chewing the enemy or send it fly. There is a wide range of weapons that promote standard RPG approaches - Weapons Dex, weapons, slow and heavy, lightweight and fast - and you will eventually unlock a NPC that can improve them if you have the appropriate materials.

For the rest of its mechanical core, Grime stirring quite closely to the traditional ARPGs of this kind, so you can probably guess that the management of endurance will be of critical importance, you can spread yourself, jumping in case of need and you 'I'll find or unlock many weapons and armor. You will have a number of consumables to help you fight. I appreciated that Grime did not try to reinvent each wheel because to know the shortcut of the genre help in the early morning, always a challenge in the Soullslike games.

Grime has a very special and surreal artistic style that is often haunting and melancholy, made even more by the excellent musical partition of Alex Roe, who wrote the kinematics and combat music of Boss, and Sean Secca, who created The ambient pieces that emphasize the rest of the game. The dirt can be surprisingly colored, with enemies that look like the spawning of a painting by Salvador Dali cross with the statues of Easter Island. Aside from the music, which often reminds the musical sensation of the partitions of Dark Souls, the sound design in Grime is quite simple. Neither the varied organic appearance environments nor the NPCs nor the enemies do a lot of noise.

Although Grime is in many ways a remarkable action game, it also has some frustrating and disappointing elements. Although a main character without face can be a powerful visual metaphor, it creates an obstacle to the relationship or the particular attention to what is happening in history already very cryptic. In fact, all the experience of playing Grime begins to look like a rather detached experience and without bloodshed, despite its sometimes engaging enemies and unique environments. The mysterious theme of a humanoid figure similar to a god in a world of animated stone is disturbing and intellectually engaging, but not particularly emotionally resonant. Defeat the boss generates relief from solving difficult puzzles more than giving the player the impression of being a hard to cook as well as it is so often the case in Dark Souls.

In the end, Grime is a successful global transposition of the 2D Soulslike sub-kind in a new and engaging world. Although it lacks the emotional wealth of the best souls games, the striking environments of grime, its solid fighting, its imaginative enemies and its original mechanisms all work together in harmony, and it clearly establishes an open formula for refinement and the possibility. .