Legend of Grimrock

[Unkillable Cat]

No, Level 10 is the last full level. The ones beyond that are either tiny or medium-sized.

 

[Metro]

No u.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I never did finish, got to level 9 and gave up. Are the later levels of the dungeon any more interesting? Is it worth playing through to the end? It's a pretty fun game but it got repetitive after a while.

It is very repetitive. That is actually my main gripe with it. So no, you didn't miss out on much, especially given that you made it to level 9. I gave up on level 7 in my first playthrough.

 

[Broseph]

I never did finish, got to level 9 and gave up. Are the later levels of the dungeon any more interesting? Is it worth playing through to the end? It's a pretty fun game but it got repetitive after a while.

It is very repetitive. That is actually my main gripe with it. So no, you didn't miss out on much, especially given that you made it to level 9. I gave up on level 7 in my first playthrough.

Yeah, I'm probably not going to bother with the sequel unless there's some more variety to the gameplay, or at least more than two tilesets for the entire dungeon. There's going to be outdoor areas, which is a start I suppose. I hope playing in them feels a little different than a dungeon with an outdoorsy coat of paint though.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Well, from where you gave up, you had coming up:

# A new enemy.

# A new tileset! That brings the grand total up to 3, IIRC.

# One long level and then three quite short levels.

# The bossfight.

I agree with you completely, any sequel to Grimrock will have to be have more variety, and the various mods and stuff have already added tons more content. But to be fair, these games were rarely little more than what you have already seen. Some had shops, some had recruitable/exchangable NPCs, a few even had memorable characters and storylines!

But yeah, fingers crossed.

 

[Jarpie]

The end boss was something I'm not surprised finns came up with and it was pretty wtf in a good sense, at least it's different than "You fight against yet-another-hugely-powerful-wizard/monster/cliche".

 

[Luzur]

well the thing had me surprised for a while there, then kinda panicked when it was so damn fast and had all that shit around it.

 

[Micmu]

Before fighting that cube, when I had to put in those missing pieces, I just *knew* it will spring to life and try to rape me.
I just didn't expect it will roll (that was actually p. cool), I was expecting it to hover and shoot lasers or something like that.

 

[Infinitron]

Before fighting that cube, when I had to put in those missing pieces, I just *knew* it will spring to life and try to rape me.

But you didn't know it would be a cube!

 

[Micmu]

Maybe not cube as it was, but some kind of similar robotic foozle, after replacing those cogs and steam pipes.

 

[Daemongar]

Well, hell, since there are spoilers all over...

The fact that you were helping it, all the while it was secretly using you for it's evil designs through your dreams, well, that could be seen a hundred miles away. On the other hand, the end fight was difficult but not for your typical "it has 1,000,000 hps, a -10 armor class, and can cast unlimited fireballs" reason. Also, I liked that enemies would impeded your movement, but the cube would just stomp on enemies that surrounded it.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Well, hell, since there are spoilers all over...

The fact that you were helping it, all the while it was secretly using you for it's evil designs through your dreams, well, that could be seen a hundred miles away.

Forgive my scepticism, but this reeks to me of the same attitude Codexers demonstrated towards the first Eschalon game, where people were claiming to have guessed in advance that they spotted the 'plot twist'. Sure, people probably guessed that whomever was talking to you through your dreams was using you. And I'm sure some people figured out that the Cube would be Bad News. But pieceing both those bits of info together beforehand? I'm very doubtful many people did that.

It looks really obvious afterwards, which explains why people are making these claims, but more often than not ego gets in the way of these things.

 

[Daemongar]

It looks really obvious afterwards, which explains why people are making these claims, but more often than not ego gets in the way of these things.

Well, there was one thing that kind of gave it away, though. (I know, i am probably totally full of shit) but there were no NPC's other than uh... Toorum. I thought it may be Toorum, but the dreams never helped or gave you their name. And, when I found his bones, well, that was about it for my suspicions (or course, that was level 9.)

There were two other things, but they may be just me, and I wasn't sure if it was by good design or poor design: 1) they never really explained all those damn gears in the dreams nor did the dream guy help and 2) most rpg's give you full health/mana after a dream sequence (they didn't make you sleep the rest off. That I think I remember from UW, but I think most others follow that convention.) In the dreams in LoG, you never got anything after dream sequence. Most of of the follow that "cut to the chase" where you wake up refreshed after the dream or whatever.

 

[Jasede]

It pains me how much less charm this game had than DM or EoB or any other of the games it emulates. I'd even rather replay DM 2 than this.

And the sad thing? This game isn't bad. It doesn't really do much wrong in its genre... it's just... sterile. Easy. Straight-forward. Dull. Hard to explain. I wonder who's with me? Even the character-building- something that should catapult this well past the likes of LoL, DM or EoB -felt soulless and spread-sheety to me in retrospect.

Don't get me wrong- I think it was a good buy. A real bargain. But I am saying that I didn't mind paying a lot more for Lands of Lore than for this. There was more... love... in it.

 

[cvv]

It pains me how much less charm this game had than DM or EoB or any other of the games it emulates. I'd even rather replay DM 2 than this.

And the sad thing? This game isn't bad. It doesn't really do much wrong in its genre... it's just... sterile. Easy. Straight-forward. Dull. Hard to explain. I wonder who's with me? Even the character-building- something that should catapult this well past the likes of LoL, DM or EoB -felt soulless and spread-sheety to me in retrospect.

Don't get me wrong- I think it was a good buy. A real bargain. But I am saying that I didn't mind paying a lot more for Lands of Lore than for this. There was more... love... in it.

I'm with you, pretty much my thoughts, except for that "I'd rather replay D2" part.
The char. dev. was badly designed, with the typical problem of primary-type and secondary-type skills bunched together with limited skill points to spend on them. So nobody spend any points on the secondary ones.
For me the game wasn't exactly soulless but older bloppers did have more charm. LoL being case in point, I love this game even though it's just a baby pap.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

A new dungeon has dropped in that peaked my interest - "Master Arakk's Treasure" involves your party descending into a 'School of Greed' to steal all the treasure within.

This one will prove to be a challenge for a fresh party, but regardless of how powerful your party is, the puzzles WILL stump you. There are LOTS of them, more than in any Grimrock dungeon I've seen so far. What's worse, you never know whether you're solving a puzzle to progress through the dungeon or just for the Iron Doors. And rushing in without examining your surroundings will stop you dead. While it's better than some of the bad Grimrock dungeons I've played, it's also suffering from some bizarre design decisions. You spend the first three levels mostly solving puzzles, with some combat thrown in from time to time. The fourth level feels at first like a break from both puzzles and combat before throwing you into two levels of almost pure combat before returning to a mix of puzzles with some combat sprinkled on. Not exactly a balanced mix. Some of the puzzles are designed so badly that you can screw yourself over for good trying to solve them.

My tips for this dungeon:

# Pick up EVERYTHING, even though you have no purpose for it. You'll soon find out why, and you never know when you'll need some filler item or a dozen torches.
# You can find a 'skeleton key' in this dungeon - a multi-use opens-all-doors key, which you'd think would make half the dungeon redundant. You're wrong. Good luck finding it, though.
# You'll run into an Ogre right at the start of level 2, but you don't have to fight it if you don't want to.
# Gems are important. If you see one, try everything in your power to grab it.
# Some non-important items are actually keys. Even some types of food are important.

Addendum: When I wrote this I had just reached Level 7 of this mod, where you must trap Goromorgs inside cages to be granted access to parts of the level below where puzzles await you, about 7 or 8 of them in total. While most are not too complicated to figure out and complete, one of them is such a complete bastard that I've given up on playing further and writing this dungeon off as "too much". This puzzle involves pushing buttons to open gates, then pushing another button to let a magic bolt through this open gate to open a gate further on. The thing is, this whole sequence is TIMED, and there's no room for error. At any point, and there are at least 6 or 7 points to this puzzle. Screw up and you have to start all over again. Except you have no idea at first where you're going, or where the button is you're supposed to push. It's like crossing a minefield via trial and error. I know this game is a throwback to "ye olde times" of game design, but some parts of this ancient game design were left in the past for a reason. I'm sorry, but this single puzzle completely kills an otherwise decent dungeon.

EDIT 2: I was bored and hungover today so I had one last go at this mod. Got EVENTUALLY past the timed puzzle, and realised that after that I was two tough fights away from the end of the mod. First I had to kill some lightning Ogres (don't ask) and then I got to the treasure hinted at in the mod's title - a humongous hall filled with gems, treasure and Juggernauts. After scrounging up some keys to unlock the exit, the mod ended.

Final verdict? For a first-time modder, this dungeon has plenty of good ideas, but it also has some horrible ones. The modder claims that she's working on a new dungeon, I hope she learned from this dungeon and avoids some of the pitfalls she made.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Ugh - I gave up on the Chaos Key after a couple of hours of play. Not my cup of tea. Reasons include:

# There's a concept in level/gaming design that could be called the Quadruple Lock - basically your progress is impeded by a door that needs four keys to unlock, and each key is located down its own path that often has a theme. These doors are usually found near the endgame, and serve as cheap filler material. Guess what the Chaos Key STARTS with? First a Double Lock, then a full-fledged Quadruple Lock right after it. These doors slow down any progress to a crawl, and for a game/mod to START with one is just a bad idea, let alone two.

# There's a monster that pops up at regular intervals, it's unkillable and spams spells at you. Its only saving grace is that it rarely sticks around for longer than a few seconds. I imported a strong party, where its damage barely fazed me, but I can guess that a freshly-started party would be butchered pretty quickly by this monster. It popped up FOUR times during the two hours I played the mod. Not cool.

# An invisible maze where the path is revealed if you wait long enough? Why even bother?

# A puzzle where you must step on 6 pressure plates to punch out a number. 7 out of every 10 people who solved this puzzle just stomped about randomly, clueless as to what the solution was.

And from what little I could glean about what lies ahead in this mod, there was NOTHING to look forward to. This mod seems to be heavily inspired by Chaos Strikes Back, but I doubt that CSB had worse pacing than this.

Right, in a fit of boredom (and pestering the author) I finally managed to complete the Chaos Key. Frankly, there is little reason to revise the above review. It gets better once you're past Level 2, and for the next 4 levels or so it is a nice mixture of puzzles and combat, but once you reach Level 7 and onwards, it starts shifting its focus more and more towards combat. On level 7 you encounter skeleton ghosts that hit extremely hard and yield no XP. On level 8 you encounter dozens of spiders, followed by more dozens of Dire Spiders. Oh, and you have to do this level without your gear. On Level 9 you meet DRAGONS, do NOT melee fight them unless you know what you're doing. Level 10 is just one huge fight once you're past the first room, on level 11 you get the skeleton ghosts again, except they're WALKING THROUGH THE WALLS. White Tower, anybody? On Level 12 you get slow-ass weak mummies which do nothing but annoy you, and on Level 13 you get a gigantic maze of death pits, HUNDREDS of Dire Spiders and the occasional dragon thrown in. At the end of that, you get the Chaos Key, and have to backtrack ALL THE WAY UP to the first level, where the Mother of All Fights awaits you. I had a high-level party for this mod, starting fresh is suicide, the spiders alone will rape your party.

As for the puzzles? Some of them are neat, but some of them serve no use whatsoever except as showcasing for the game, no real thought is used in them. There's a maze with invisible walls, showing only the walls nearest to you. There's another maze where you 'carve' the path through. The Automap makes these two puzzles totally pointless. It's clear that the author was running out of steam and ideas when making this mod, in my opinion it would have been better to make a bigger mod using the best ideas from The Master Key and The Chaos Key.

Tips for this mod?

# If you're missing a key somewhere, turn off the lights and look on the ground. (Small metal things glint in the dark.) You would NOT believe how often this is the case.

# There are shops dotted throughout the dungeon, charging you Bronze, Silver or Gold coins for various objects. Early on these are a godsend, but later on they serve little to no use whatsoever.

# There are tons of hidden buttons around containing small caches of items and treasure.

# Do NOT open any doors needing Skull Keys (they are really easy to spot) until you have found 3 of them.

# Do NOT fall down any holes on Level 12, they will kill you.

# The Power Gem is plot-vital and needed for several puzzles. If you ever have to give it up, make sure you always pick it up again. As for getting it in the first place - grab it and WAIT.

# The unkillable enemy is actually the boss. You have to kill him Dungeon Master style, Force Cages and Power Staff and all.

Overall? For advanced Grimrock players only.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

(Insert Necro emoticon of choice here]

I thought I'd have a look and see if any cool Grimrock mods were coming out. Didn't find any, but one of the older ones caught my eye - "Forbidden Halls".

Forbidden Halls sports 10 levels of "standard" Grimrock fare. It's one of the first dungeons to be released since the Editor became available, but oddly enough it doesn't show, it's a pretty solid mod in terms of build and layout. In fact one of its strong points is the writing. Your party falls into a cave and finds itself in unexplored and unknown halls, seemingly long abandoned. The mod is actually very informative about what areas you're in, levels are properly named, areas and rooms are also marked. Plenty of stuff to read, and it's through the writing that a pretty decent narrative is unearthed. But the gist is the same as for the original game: Escape.

+ Puzzle difficulty is natural and progessive, but they never get too hard. At most you just have to look around carefully and find all the relevant bits.

+ Awesome writing, easily the best I've seen in a Grimrock mod.

- Sadly that writing is not done by a native English speaker. Typos and bad grammar are abound, but never to the extent that puzzles become unsolvable.

- All the spells have been re-arranged. For no reason. You'll have to re-learn every single one of them.

- Due to key arrangements, you may miss out on several rooms because you used the key elsewhere. While I never got into trouble because of it, it wouldn't surprise me if it was perfectly possible to get screwed by the keys alone. My only suggestion is to mark every locked door on the map, and whenever you find a key, to GO BACK to the first door still locked and try it there, not the nearest door. I was pretty thorough and still couldn't open some doors in the Bastion and in the Golem Factory.

- Combat gets BRUTAL pretty quickly. The author suggests a fresh party. I totally disagree. I imported my party and found myself in some very silly fights. While they were no trouble for my Level 20 party, I can easily imagine low-level characters getting massacred wholesale. There are lots of forced fights, no room to maneuver in. The worst one was probably the spiralling corridor with grates in the floor and a tentacle monster under EVERY SINGLE one of them. They even respawned behind me while trudging through! There's also a room full of respawning slimes, to the point that you CANNOT clear them out, it's like fighting tar.

Overall? Only for bored Grimrock players who love the combat.

Some hints:

Spoiler

# Torches are your friend for the first few levels. For many reasons.

# Some spellscrolls have a charge in them, so they're not completely useless.

# Slimes are much tougher, they split once to reveal two lesser slimes. Of course you'll be running into LOADS of them, naturally...

# Normal skeletons are abound, but soon you'll run into skeletons with green vapor coming from their skulls. These are extra tough nuts.

# There's a non-glowing slime on Level 5, it's actually the toughest monster in the mod and is worth 2000 XP. Fortunately you'll see it before it can see you.

# Food works differentely and resting as well. Hunger will become a problem.

# There's a room on level 7 where the only warning is "Eternal... jail... danger..." Be mindful of this warning, there's only some minor XP and The Dismantler in there, but in order to escape you must play the dodging game while pressing 12 buttons in sequence.

# Speaking of dodging, one of the Ogres on Level 5 is invincible. You'll have to find an alternate way to kill it.

# Pits with glowing green light coming from them will insta-kill you, don't fall down them.

# No matter how hardcore you think you are, you WILL need the Automap for this mod, if only for Level 6.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.grimrock.net/2013/11/23/live-action-grimrock/?

Live Action Grimrock?!
Oh boy, here comes some huge news! We have a hard time even believing it ourselves but Wayside Creations, the creators of the most excellent Fallout – Nuka Break web series and films, are looking into creating a live action Legend of Grimrock series! Stay tuned for more info!



PS. This is my first blog post where every sentence ended in an exclamation point but this totally deserves it!

O_o

 

[felipepepe]

WHY?

 

[Cosmo]

WHY?

Because it only needs walls and four actors ?

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

WHY?

Because it only needs walls and four actors ?

It could end up as innovative/cheap as Cube: one cubed room as the set with variously painted panels as walls/roof/floor switched around every "step".

 

[Cosmo]

Could be good, but I predict it will all be about quirky characters designed for people who like Comic Con and fan-pandering.

 

[Jack Dandy]

What Cosmo said. I wonder if it'll even take place inside a dungeon.

Still, excited to see how it'll end up.

 

[V_K]

One episode per dungeon level? Could end on the short side though.