You know 2D Soulslike Metroidvania’s? Grime is one of them. It does have a very interesting setting and aesthetic. It’s rooted in the idea of creatures being shaped from clay or soil, like the way Genesis says man was created from the earth. So there’s NPCs with vaguely humanoid bodies and misshapen, boulderous heads, and they make a pilgrimage alongside you towards a place where sculptors (also made from stone) chisel them into more slender, evenly proportioned, human-looking forms. Also, you play as a black hole. I’m not really sure what the significance of that is, if anything, but your head is a black hole and your XP is mass that you get from defeated enemies and you get more powerful as you gain mass. The rest of your body is a sculpted stone humanoid body, and a bunch of NPCs get angry at you because you didn’t have to do all the usual groveling before the cult of the sculptors to get yours, it just kinda happened, but also you have a black hole for a head.
This is a cool theme, but it’s hard to find anything to say about the game besides that it is indeed another Metroidvania and it’s got a cool vibe about stone being sculpted into flesh and also something about black holes whose relation I’m not entirely sure of. Definitely I feel like this game gambled on having a community that cared enough to piece the lore together and lost. There’s definitely some discussions of it lying around, but there sure ain’t no Mossbag videos tying it all together. Still, like most of these games, you can get a rough idea what’s going on just by paying attention at all, even if there’s no obessive lore deciphering looking over every nook and cranny to make sure we got everything.
Granted, it probably doesn’t help that the controls inexplicably broke halfway through the game (the right analog stick is no longer working, which is critical to gameplay – it works fine in other games, so it probably isn’t that the controller is broken), and it doesn’t say great things about it that I didn’t care enough to put much effort into fixing it. Into Regrets because it’s literally unplayable. I’ve definitely played and enjoyed worse Metroidvanias, but Grime isn’t doing enough new things for me to try to fix it for more than 30 minutes.
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