Legend of Grimrock II

Legend of Grimrock II is a masterpiece. Go give the developers your money.

...What? Why are you still here? That wasn't enough for you?

Fine, fine. I'll do it properly.

Legend of Grimrock II is a dungeon crawler sequel to Legend of Grimrock, which was also amazing and should be purchased with your money. As you might have guessed from the focus of this blog and the types of works I review, I care a lot about plot and story. But Legend of Grimrock II is not that kind of game. There's no dialogue or characters or narrative. Instead the game provides a experience laser-focused on exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving.

The game is a real-time grid-based first-person dungeon-crawler. You play as four prisoners who have been marooned on a strange island after their transport ship is caught in a strange storm. This may sound like the set-up to a survival game where you need to forage for parts and build a ship, but... you don't, you just need to kill some monsters and explore some dungeons.

There's no story or dialogue or NPCs or anything of that nature. You wake up on the beach, and are expected to immediately start collecting sticks and attacking turtles. You're playing the game for the experience of progressing through it, not to assist the characters in their journey.

And it's great! There's a simple, compelling gameplay loop of exploring an area while fighting enemies and solving puzzles to collect loot in order to assemble the tools needed to survive in the next, higher-powered area. The fact that there's no characters or towns or cutscenes means there's nothing to interrupt or distract you from the exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving. You are literally always creeping through new meticulously-crafted areas filled with novel designs and challenges. It's like an endless buffet where you don't even need to pause to refill your plate.

As I already said, the game world is grid-based. Pretty much everything (your party included) takes up one square. Your party is arranged in a 2x2 formation, and each party member can hold an item in each hand (although you have two load-outs you can swap between, so in effect each party member can have four items on-hand). Right-clicking a held item will use it, and items are straightforward in their effects. Swords are swung, bows are fired, potions are drunk, et cetera. Some items also have special abilities, which are activated by right-clicking and holding. After a character takes an action, there's a cooldown until they can use an item again.

I think the only item effect that isn't immediately apparent is spellcasting. Using an item that lets you cast spells will bring up a 3x3 rune grid. Casting a spell requires tracing the proper symbol for the spell in the rune grid and clicking the "cast" button (while having energy and the requisite magic skills). Throughout the world are scrolls which teach you the spells, but there's no formal process of learning a spell, so even if you haven't found a spell's scroll yet you can still cast it if (you have the right skills and) you figure out its symbol from guesswork (or cheating). (Casting a spell actually does cause the character to "learn" it, but that just means the symbol is added to a list so you can easily refer back to it later.)

Combat takes place in real time in the main game world, making combat feel like it is fully integrated with the exploration and puzzle-solving. Monsters hit hard, so the main strategy tends to be moving around and positioning yourself so that you can hit the monsters but they can't hit you. While this is relatively simple while dealing with one monster in an open area, it can get quite hectic when facing down multiple enemies in unfamiliar corridors.

Exploration is pretty straightforward. You just... walk around and explore. The game has a map which automatically fills itself in, which greatly helps with navigation, and you can add symbols and notes to mark things down that you aren't able to handle or solve on your initial visit. While the first Legend of Grimrock just covered a single linear dungeon, Legend of Grimrock II features a variety of locales, keeping things fresh as you traverse the island.

The final major game component is puzzles. The game is absolutely packed with them, providing an engaging series of mini-challenges beyond mere combat. They vary in style and difficulty, but none push the bounds of difficulty in either direction. Beyond the obligatory puzzles necessary to proceed through the dungeons, the game is also full of secrets, which makes thoroughly searching and exploring the game feel truly rewarding. Additionally, other than hidden switches that just open up secret caches, pretty much every single secret in the game is clued in some form, whether it's by showing you the hidden room (but not how to reach it) or in a cryptic note buried halfway across the game world.

A lot of games have combat, exploration, and puzzles, but what sets Legend of Grimrock II apart is how well it distills its experience down to these three components. Everything is set in tight, meticulously-designed areas and dungeons that provides for at least one encounter or puzzle in every room. There's no wasted space, there's no filler, there's no pause for a separate battle screen, there's no grinding, there's no side quests, there's no cutscenes. Explore, fight, solve, repeat. I feel like the review might be getting repetitive at this point, but it's hard to overstate just how glorious it is to have dense, high-quality, curated, engaging, action-packed adventuring with absolutely no breaks, disruptions or interruptions.

The game has beautiful, high-quality 3D graphics. While not ultra-realistic, they still create an immersive fully-realized game world. The sound design is mostly atmospheric, which is perfect for a tense, solitary dungeon dive. Was that noise an enemy waiting around the corner to ambush you, a switch being triggered, or just a random bump in the night? There are a few music tracks throughout the game, providing a backdrop for the highlights.

Legend of Grimrock II gives you plenty of room to design and customize your party. Each character has a race, class, attributes, traits, and skills. Your race modifies your base attributes, gives you a passive bonus, and affects some of the traits available to that character. Your class affects your health and energy base amount and growth rate (and some classes provide a boost to some other stats as well) and provides a passive or two, and that's it. There's no class-specific skill trees or equipment or anything like that; there's no reason you can't have a sword-swinging wizard or a magic-wielding barbarian. They probably won't be as effective as a sword-wielding barbarian or a magic-casting wizard, but they'll probably be more effective than a sword-using wizard or magic-slinging barbarian in most other games. Your attributes are your base statistics that are used to calculate a number of other character parameters. These get boosted when you level up and through equipment. Traits are two passives that you get to choose at character creation; these are unique, and you never get more beyond your initial two. There are 16 skills, each of which have five levels. Each point in a skill provides a flat bonus, and each skill also has one or two special bonuses for reaching certain levels. For instance, each level of Accuracy increases your accuracy stat by 10, and each point into Fire Magic (additively) increases the damage of fire magic by 20%. The second level of Accuracy also allows the character to make melee attacks from the back row, while the fifth level of Fire Magic provides 50 fire resistance. (Spells will also have magic skill requirements, crafting certain potions requires sufficient alchemy skill, and some equipment will have skill requirements to equip or use the special ability.) You get about 15 skill points in a standard playthrough, which translates to three maxed skills. Enough to develop a character, but not enough to delve into fun "extra" skills.

So there's a lot of moving pieces, but at the end of the day there's only three main ways of dealing damage: melee combat, ranged combat, and magic. There are multiple ways of doing each (for instance, there are throwing weapons, missile weapons, and firearms for ranged combat, and four elemental schools of magic), which helps provide direction for building a party while providing variations even within the same general party "configurations" as well as how you actually implement each character.

As I previously alluded, Legend of Grimrock II builds upon the previous game by expanding from a linear dungeon into a semi-open world. In the original you proceeded through the dungeon level by level, rarely backtracking or making use of verticality in any meaningful way (beyond an abundance of trap doors). Legend of Grimrock II is split into multiple areas, and each area has multiple floors, typically an overworld area and two levels of dungeons. You have a fair degree of freedom in the order in which you approach the areas and dungeons, further strengthening the feeling of freedom and exploration. Of course, this produces a bit of a worry in whether you're going through the game in the most enjoyable order, but it's clear the developers put in the time and attention to support multiple playstyles. Most unique utility items appear in a few places in the game, in completely different parts of the map—obviously so that you can obtain the item at around the same point in the game regardless of the order you tackle the areas.

Health management is largely unchanged from the original game. Scattered throughout the world are healing crystals that fully heal your party, but require time to recharge after use. You can also find or make health potions, or rest to recover health (at the cost of increasing your hunger). The healing crystals effectively provide infinite free healing (in a normal game), but sometimes you'll get beaten up immediately after using one, and having to wait for the recharge can be boring.

On the subject of hunger, that system also returns. Each character has a hunger gauge, which must periodically be satisfied with food. If a character goes hungry, their stats will be lowered and will periodically lose health, so it's important to keep them topped off. While this does seem like it has the potential to be oppressive—your food supply effectively serves as the time limit you have to beat the game, after all—the game throws so much food at you it never comes close to mattering (in a typical playthrough; there are alternate conditions you can add onto your save file to make the game more challenging).

Of course, even though Legend of Grimrock II is a masterpiece, that doesn't make it flawless.

My biggest complaint is that combat can sometimes feel draggy, as a consequence of a change that was clearly meant to address an issue they saw with the original game. In the first Legend of Grimrock, enemies could only attach the square in front of them, and could only turn and move forward. Consequently, any solitary enemy could be defeated without taking damage as long as you had a two-by-two area to fight them in. All you had to do was stand by their side, wail on them, and then, when they turned, move around them so you stood at their side again. Perhaps a bit of a cheap tactic, but it was effective and the game didn't give you many other options, given how hard enemies hit and how few supplies you had.

In Legend of Grimrock II, they decided to address this by giving basically every enemy the ability to simultaneously turn and attack. However, enemy movement otherwise remained the same, and you could attack enemies as they moved into a square. Consequently, it's still possible to safely fight any sole enemy in a two-by-two area. Just stand diagonal from them, face the same direction they are facing, and then when they move forward (into the square directly in front of you), unleash all your attacks (as the enemy is moving into the square) and immediately move to the side to the new diagonal space (since as soon as the enemy reaches the new square, they will use their turning attack on you).

It might not sound like much, but the difference is actually pretty huge. The distinction is that in Legend of Grimrock II, you need to wait for the enemy to move to attack them. In the original game you could consistently attack the enemy as you wove from side to side. But Legend of Grimrock II requires you to wait for the enemy to move before you can unleash a barrage on them, and then wait for them to move again before you can attack again, and so on and so forth. (But you don't want them to move too quickly, since if they move before your cooldowns have finished you won't be able to do anything.) As a result, a fair amount of the combat consists of just waiting for the enemy to move, which is not as quick or exciting as being able to consistently attack off-cooldown.

Of course, this issue only arises when fighting a sole enemy in a clear two-by-two space, and the game is seldom so kind as to provide that.

Inventory management is also unchanged from the prior game, and is pretty much the only interruption in adventuring. Your inventory is limited both by the number of inventory slots each character has and the total weight each character can carry. You can find bags and crates which increase the number of slots a character has, but they act as their own little mini-inventory rather than adding to the main inventory, adding to the hassle of item management. If any character exceeds their carrying capacity your movement speed will be reduced (or, if they carry enough, you'll be rendered immobile), so the weight capacity is effectively a hard limit. As you pick up new loot in dungeons you'll often need to shuffle items around your party members to keep them all under weight. If they insisted on keeping these limits in (since they don't have much of a practical effect once you find a central location you can dump all your extra items in—no item is affected in any way by the passage of time, whether in your inventory or dropped on the ground), it would've been nicer if you had a consolidated, central inventory. But in the game's defense, I do feel like the inventory management adds a nice touch of realism. (After all, in a real adventure managing your supplies would be vitally important, so if there weren't any logistical inconveniences, there would be no way it could be a real adventure.)

I also liked the premise of the original game a bit more. In the original you played as a group of four prisoners who were thrown into a dungeon inside Mt. Grimrock, with the promise that you would win your freedom if you made it to the exit at the base of the mountain. (This is how the country's penal system worked. Spoiler: nobody has ever gotten their freedom this way.) It provided an explanation for why you were here and a reason to make it to the end. As I described at the beginning of the review, in Legend of Grimrock II, you again play as four prisoners, but this time you just get shipwrecked. Ending up on the island is a coincidence, it feels a bit contrived how your characters are the only survivors of the wreck, and it feels a bit weird how you immediately start fighting monsters instead of looking for food, shelter, and a way off, but... that's the way it goes. (And "Grimrock" doesn't factor into the game at all!) Legend of Grimrock II does build up a nice story that goes well beyond the plot of "enter dungeon, try to leave dungeon" of the original, but I still much preferred the base premise of the first game.

My final issue—a holdover from the original game—is that each tileset only has one "wall with hidden button." As long as you're dealing with the same environment, every single wall with a hidden button will have the hidden button in the same place. While this makes hunting for hidden buttons a lot less frustrating than if each was unique, it feels contrived and unrealistic.

But these are truly minor quibbles compared to how grand and fantastic the game is. The vast majority of the game is spent in a glorious adventure of exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving. If you want story and characters, that isn't here, but if you desire pure adventure this game has distilled that to its purest form. I love this game and the original, and if they sound interesting to you at all you should get them because they are pure masterpieces.

And, if all that glowing praise wasn't enough for you, just try and listen to this and remain uninterested. I dare you.