3.3 hours played
Written 1 year and 8 months ago
Grunnd is a point and click adventure game with no adventure and poorly implemented pointing and clicking. I'll be up front and say I did not like this game. I enjoy surreal and interpretive works like Pathologic or Who's Lila?, but this was a slog to get through. It feels like half of a game. I can put aside the short length (3 hours), but the ending choices felt rushed. I didn't care about any of the "characters" and really had no reason to care. Most of them blatantly refuse to answer your questions and are so off-putting that I could care less what fate besets them.
The jank of this game is unbelievable. The "Hero" (that's what he's called) will just walk in place randomly, walk back and forth desperately trying to figure out how to walk down some stairs and moves with all of the speed of a crippled sloth. The movement is agonizingly slow. You can fast travel almost anywhere any time and it makes for some unintentionally bizarre moments. Interacting with the wide open gate to the "farm" will cause the narrator to still comment on how it can be opened from the other side. When I grabbed the ticket from the outpost, went down the elevator, and came back up, it reappeared in the slot to be picked up again. Going down the one way elevators, upon fast traveling up the hill again, the elevator was reset. This game is a mess. Indie or not, there is a supreme lack of polish here. Almost every line of dialogue is voiced, but then dialogue will appear with no voice acting when everything else is voiced. Many lines of dialogue will not match the voiced lines and are often littered with grammatical and spelling errors. The controls are atrocious. Clicking to move is finnicky and interacting with prompts seems to work 50% of the time. In dialogue, lines will sometimes just flow on their own, but then randomly will require me to click "Continue" to get the next line of dialogue. Why? The keypad got stuck on screen at one point requiring a save reload. The game got stuck loading indefinitely requiring a full restart.
Even when the game is working, it's just not fun, compelling, scary, funny, just boring. It's a tedious experience overall. There are moments of tension that had me hooked, but it just never goes anywhere. It's always just a little eerie, but the moment fades before there can be any payoff. Details about the setting, characters, and story are drip fed so slowly and in such a fragmented manner that it's hard to stay invested when almost nothing is revealed. Entire plot points seem to just disappear from relevance all together. Why did the fortune teller say she'd help me later when that never happens? Why was there a dark cave in the side of the mountain that I can't enter? Why does everyone comment on how the outpost lacks any doors, but I still have the ability to enter it? How did "Hero" even get in? He mentions there aren't even any windows either. What were the trash collectors doing with their victims? It's like an assortment of secrets that just stay as secrets. No climax or resolution.
The biggest issue I have with "Hero" is that he's the gateway to this strange dreamlike/nightmarish little town, but I can't put myself in his shoes. He'll be just as confused as we are making it easy to connect with him, but then he'll just say and do weird shit for whatever reason I can't fathom. Why would he ask some guy he just met to join him at an inn? Why is talking to some woman holding a baby we've never met previously like he knows her? I don't know her. He's just as much of a weirdo as everyone else. Pathologic worked because the Bachelor was just as much of an outsider as we are. He's easy to connect with.
For the positives, the voice acting is mostly good, sometimes awful. The narrator is very good. He does his job well. The man at the disco was terrible. It's like he was switching inflections at random while talking. The boy, bless his heart, spoke like he's just reading words without understanding what they mean. The art style is very beautiful. It feeds into the bleak neo-noir atmosphere of the game. There's a lot of thick shading to everything and it reminds me of Disco Elysium a bit, but much darker. There are issues here as well with bugged animations and weird scaling. The bouncer at the disco looks massive when he's guarding the door, but then is normal size when he's outside. The soundtrack is incredibly atmospheric and tense. A lot of good ambient tracks that helped with the immersion. However, that metal track was just jarring and felt out of place.
Grunnd is just a little too vague for my taste and with all of the jank, it's a hard sell. Multiple endings to an unpleasant experience doesn't undo the tedium of playing the game just to get there. It's just not something I'd ever play again and I can't in good faith recommend something I didn't enjoy. (4/10)
