Legend of Grimrock 2

If there's one thing recent Kickstarter projects and acclaimed Indie games continue to prove is that there's a lot of money in mining nostalgia. This doesn't necessarily suggest that any such project is inherently avaricious: it's more that the larger developers have, for far too long, dictated the fashions and trends of the gaming industry without properly assessing whether many older genres died because people stopped caring about them or simply because someone high up determined that they wouldn't sell without giving them the opportunity to prove otherwise. Almost Human's 2012 dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock established there was still some life yet in searching walls for secret buttons and throwing rocks over pits to hit bridge-activating pressure plates on the other side. The first-person real-time puzzle-focused dungeon-crawler was a very specific kind of CRPG but for a time it ruled the roost - in much the same way that the Infinity Engine and Diablo-style loot-fests would in computer gaming generations to come - and there's evidently a great number of CRPG fanatics who have missed them in their extended absence.

Legend of Grimrock 2, Almost Human's 2014 follow-up to their 2012 loving homage to FTL's Dungeon Master and the early first-person real-time dungeon crawlers that it inspired, is a much more ambitious game than its antecedent in many important ways. As well as expanding the size of the game in the amount of pure square feet, the game's new setting allows the developers to create a lot of thematically different regions and dungeons: from outdoor forests and beaches to musty ruins and immaculate pyramid tombs. This expanded variation extends to the game's many devious traps and puzzles, as well as its larger bestiary of hostile creatures ready to sneak up on an unexpecting party around the corner of a dark corridor. The art and sound design of the game continues to be sterling in these new environments as well, setting the right tone and atmosphere for each of its locations: the eerie crypts of the graveyard area are genuinely terrifying to skulk around in; the natural sounds of the outdoors are a literal breath of fresh air after emerging from one of the game's many subterranean areas; and the silent halls of the game's final locations nevertheless give voice to their portentousness. While players are locked into the game's deliberately primitive four-directional grid-based movement, they can hold the right mouse-button to freely look around and absorb the game's elaborate 3D environments.

To an extent, this broadened approach to its level design is Grimrock's 2 acknowledgement of Dungeon Master's own sequel: 1993's Dungeon Master II: Legend of Skullkeep. That game presented outdoor environments and a central tower-like location that was the party's ultimate destination: however, in order to climb the tower, the party had to traverse the four corners of its surrounding landscape for the necessary items to proceed. Similarly, a Grimrock 2 player will discover the central and imposing Castle Nex early on in their peregrinations, but entering the structure requires four elemental stones each of which in turn requires that four "power gems" are placed in respective elemental shrines found all over the island. Power gems are often rewarded for reaching the bottom of a dungeon, fighting a boss or solving a particularly intricate puzzle: with these McGuffins, the developers are able to determine a reward structure that's a little more loose and variable beyond simply moving from one floor of a dungeon to the next. Power gems aren't particularly subtle either: they'll float in mid-air, radiating an iridescent light with a very noticeable hum, ensuring that the player cannot possibly miss them whenever they are close by. The game has twenty of these power gems, though only sixteen are needed (four for each of the four elemental stones) to complete it, giving the player a break if one or more proves too difficult or too obtuse to attain.

However, this non-linearity is also the game's greatest strength comparative to the original Legend of Grimrock: if a gem is too challenging to reach, there's plenty more in other locations to pursue. It's also how the game manages to balance its monster difficulty: if a region is too taxing on the party with its encounters, it's a good idea to retreat to one of the game's many branching paths and try a different cardinal point on the compass. The first two regions of the game - Shipwreck Beach and Twigroot Forest - work as an extended tutorial before the player reaches the Forgotten River and finds the game's first branch: south to Keelbreach Bog or north to Sleet Island. Sleet Island itself goes to three other locations all but assuring that there will always be somewhere new to explore.

Grimrock 2 continues to be a treat to those familiar with the history of the first-person dungeon crawler genre. For instance, the game now has underwater sections which will quickly drain the health of the party if they spend too long swimming around without coming up for air: such sections became a familiar terror in later Eye of the Beholder games, causing some amount of tension when an exit to dry land becomes elusive. Grimrock 2 also reintroduces a few of its own quirks, like a number of treasures kept behind golden locks: as there's only a limited number of golden keys in the game with which to reach them, it becomes necessary to eye the treasures behind the locked doors and barriers and judge if the contents are worthy of one of your precious keys. The game also invests in its early pirate theme with a number of buried treasure chests, each of which has an associated hint or treasure map. While the first Legend of Grimrock was fond of pulling the rug out from under the player (or, more frequently, opening a trapdoor beneath them), Grimrock 2 doubles down on this insidious sense of humor; it frequently surprised me with its teleport traps and the recurring leprechaun-esque "Trickster" enemy, who felt like the spiritual successor to Dungeon Master's infamously light-fingered Gigglers.

As for the player characters, there's still the requisite party of four to control with two at the back and two at the front (depending on which direction the enemies are attacking from). The assortment of races has been extended to include the dextrous Ratlings, who are also an ubiquitous threat on the island itself, and there's a number of new classes to adopt. Each new level leads to an additional skill point which can be spent in sixteen different skills to further customize and specialize characters. Not all of them are equal, unfortunately: the newly added firearm weapon type are often too much trouble for their meager damage output, running as they do on finite ammunition. I also found Fire and Air magic to be far more preferable to Earth, though there's some degree of subjectivity in how you wish to proceed. Going all in on an interesting but less practical skill certainly won't make the game impossible, after all. Likewise, classes serve a similar role in this game that they do in Skyrim or Dark Souls in that they're more of a loose template to build from in any direction - via the game's malleable skill system - than very restrictive, specific roles that the character is shackled to for the rest of the game. You can teach a Barbarian magic if you so wish, spending skill points in magical skills like Fire Magic or Concentration, though their stat progression would suggest that they're generally better utilized standing on the front row with a giant weapon in their hand. Also, like Dark Souls, there's an extremely underpowered starting class intended for people who wish to truly challenge themselves.

All the above said, you don't have to be an established fan or veteran player of this genre to enjoy and appreciate what Legend of Grimrock 2 has in store. It plays considerably differently than other modern incarnations of the first-person dungeon crawler - Etrian Odyssey, for instance, is far more the scion of the turn-based Wizardry series - and the last retail game that used Grimrock's specific real-time dungeon-crawling gameplay was released well over a decade ago. What the first Legend of Grimrock did very well, and Grimrock 2 continues to do well, was to resurrect the trappings of this hoary CRPG sub-genre and modernize it for a contemporary audience; effectively demonstrating what was so appealing about these tense RPG-puzzle hybrids without bogging the player down with their archaic game design. Resurrecting heroes simply involves walking to the nearest glowing crystal to bring them back to life - the player can opt to make all the crystals in the game single-use for an added challenge - and the leveling system is hardly as Byzantine as something like 2nd Edition D&D... though is fortunately still robust enough to allow for a great deal of variation in one's customized party. Both Legend of Grimrock 2 and its predecessor are designed explicitly to be as much of an accessible gateway for newcomers as it is a nostalgic homage for genre veterans.

The game does have a few downsides though. The loading times seemed suspiciously long, almost as if they were artificially lengthened to dissuade save-scumming. It would probably be less paranoid to chalk that up to the game's size and, quite possibly, my own system's lack of processing power. There's a handy teleportation hub to quickly get around the island, but it only extends to four locations and there's no way to get back to it from, say, the third basement level of a particularly large dungeon other than walking all the way back (though a few locations do have a teleporter back to the surface level, at least). The game also refused to implement any kind of economy or shopping system, possibly because of how difficult it would be to balance such a feature without players exploiting it; though it's worth noting that a trading system is one advancement that Legend of Grimrock 2 doesn't share with the twenty-two year old Dungeon Master II. How I miss that game's many merchants and their rotating tables. If there's two things rotating tables are good for it's commerce and receiving an antidote to the poison you just drank. It should also be clearly stated somewhere that if you didn't like Legend of Grimrock's gameplay in general, there's nothing about Legend of Grimrock 2 that's likely to win you over despite being a better game overall. It definitely continues in the spirit of that game, in much the same way that Legend of Grimrock continues in the spirit of its decades-old inspirations.

While Legend of Grimrock 2 is very much more of the first, most of the choices it made when adding new features were intelligent ones: there's more mechanics and dungeon settings to keep the game fresh and varied; the revamped skills-heavy character progression offers far more opportunities for distinctive, bespoke heroes; the branching non-linearity means that the game doesn't immediately come to a screeching halt when the player simply cannot figure out the next pressure plate/teleporter puzzle; and even with all its new elements Grimrock's charmingly malevolent core is carefully preserved. It's odd to applaud a game for being even more evil than its predecessor, but it's a trait so vital to the enjoyment of this series that I cannot help but admire whenever it dumps me into a room full of mimics because I dared to reach for some treasure in a benign-looking niche. I'm pretty sure I uttered "clever girl" more than once while playing.