Really have to give Reddit props here as this was a game I was on the fence about but so so happy I checked this out. I’ll admit the graphics are off-putting though can’t say it isn’t unique but what we have here is a special metroidvania or soulsvania or action RPG whatever you wanna call it. This game has some systems that are very unique and really make the game stand out, with the most impressive being the enemy trait system. Every enemy pretty much you can absorb (re: parry) when you get their health to a certain point at which point you unlock a unique trait that you can upgrade such as regain stamina quicker or do more damage after a parry. But they get way more practical and essential. It makes you want to go after every enemy and engage with the system exhaustively. Add no soul runs when you die (I.e. you keep your experience) and you have a perfect recipe for exploration. Exploration very rewarding. The bosses are very fair and challenging. I never felt as if I cheesed them or were unfair. The platforming and upgrades were very fun and usually had multiple purposes. The combat loop was super neat with parries and another ability I won’t mention that really keeps things engaging. As usual story is way over my head and I didn’t engage at all. Super happy I checked this out I feel like it’s a bit under talked about. Excited for the sequel. About 21 hours to beat at 63% completion.

Visualmente é lindíssimo, a direção de arte desse jogo é muito pica, a gameplay no geral é meio lenta, mas diverte, o grande problema dele é a falta de balanceamento, o sistema de parry tem uma janela muito esquisita e os últimos chefes são simplesmente infernais, precisa de umas 3 mãos pra conseguir jogar direito, isso sem falar dos trechos plataforma simplesmente tenebrosos de chatos, o esforço em terem lançado uma cacetada de expansões grátis é bem legal, mas por conta desses chefes que me deixaram puto da vida e esse parkour horrível, eu prefiro só zerar o jogo base mesmo e tá de bom tamanho.

A uniquely imaginative nightmare with familiar souls-vania systems. Art direction does most of the lifting here, but in a wonderfully-affecting way.

Took a bit to click, but completely consumed me with a weighty sense of dread and wonder. I didn’t feel motivated to 100% the map like I do with the best of the best in metroidvanias, but I can confirm it as a remarkable entry in the genre. Some of the second-bar boss phases feel unwelcome at first, but offer an interesting icing-on-the-cake layer to the challenge.

A relieving finish.

Logo no início de Grime dá pra perceber que é um jogo com orçamento baixo. Os gráficos são relativamente simples e as animações um pouco travadas e estranhas. Mas o gameplay em si não é muito atrapalhado pela animação, como acontece em outros jogos.

Tendo uma inspiração em metroidvania e soulslike, Grime consegue um equilíbrio bem interessante, trazendo desafio, boa exploração e boa plataforma. Foi uma grande surpresa e me fez jogar até o fim sem esforço. Alguns personagens e algumas histórias são interessantes, apesar de alguns segredos serem muito obscuros.

A arte se tornou cansativa depois de um tempo, mas o gameplay foi divertido até o final, e o desafio dos chefes, que são dificeis, mas com bom design, me manteve interessado.

Sights & Sounds
- At first, the game is a visual feast. Light glistening off of slick cave floors. A strange but eerily cool-looking protagonist. Twisted, grotesque enemies and towering Lovecraftian monsters lurk around every corner, but you have monstrous crushing weapons and iridescent armor to protect yourself
- These initial impressions slowly fade. By-and-large, the looks of the enemies and gear stay consistently good, but boss design reuse and the omnipresence of cave environments get a little stale by hour 15. "Oh, I've gone through blue cave and pink cave, but now I need to go through green cave to get to slightly greener cave." Or, "Oh cool, a second 4-armed rock monster with different attack sequencing. I bet the final boss won't have a phase like that"
- Gripes aside, the visual design did leave a very good impression. It's eerie, brooding, and mysterious. I kept coming back for more
- The music is what you'd expect given the Lovecraftian and Souls-like influences. Ominous, sweeping orchestral and choral arrangements punctuated by sparse, austere pieces

Story & Vibes
- There's some meat on the bones lore-wise, but not as intricately woven as other similar games. Overtly, the story is about your character bringing about the end of the world, but there's slightly more to it than that if you pay attention to the NPCs and item descriptions
- Expect to see plenty of genre tropes about death/rebirth and destruction/creation

Playability & Replayability
- But all of that hardly matters because there's cool weapons to find and difficult bosses to kill them with
- Weapon variety is honestly very impressive as are the corresponding move sets. You've got stuff like tooth fists with projectile attacks, centipede whips with AOE, and axes that literally chew through enemies
- Armor designs are similarly excellent. Sure, eating an entire city after putting on a theater performance is cool, but it's even better if you're dressed in glowing mother of pearl armor while doing it
- The moment-to-moment gameplay feels fantastic. In combat, attacking feels fluid and natural. Small weapons like dual daggers feel speedy and spammable, but heavy attacks with giant hammers feel weighty and crushing. Dodging also feels very fair, though I feel like a few more invincibility frames would have saved me a dozen or so deaths
- Platforming is also excellent. As you'd expect from a metroidvania, you unlock ways to traverse the environment as you go, but Grime has a cool way of making you string them together into some of the most difficult platforming sections I've had the pleasure of completing

Overall Impressions & Performance
- While I was disappointed by some of the reused environments and copy/paste bosses, the game has a lot going for it. It looks incredible and presents players with a tough but ultimately satisfying challenge. That was more than enough to impress me
- Mix the platforming of Ori with the combat of Blasphemous, and you'll get an idea of what it feels like to play
- I played the game entirely on Steam Deck and swapped the left stick and d-pad in the layout settings. 2D platformers just feel more natural without an analog stick. Performance-wise, I did unfortunately experience some occasional framiness, but it was mostly fine. Ran well otherwise

Final Verdict
- 9/10. If you're a fan of the genre and love a challenge, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. Looking forward to seeing more from this developer, because this was a really impressive first release

Grime es un Metroidvania Soulslike que es más que competente en sus géneros.

En cuanto a sus apartados positivos, destaca mucho la calidad visual, la estética, la trama y narrativa implícita, y sus cómodos y fáciles controles.
El sistema de parry está bastante bien logrado, nos da bastante rango de error para que no se vuelva un juego extremadamente difícil. En cuanto a su dificultad, está bien establecida; tiene mobs que son un dolor de cabeza y jefes que muy probablemente no pasarás al primer intento, ni al segundo, ni al tercero... Sus desafíos están bien diseñados, así también como su plataformeo y su diseño de mapas, del cual podemos siempre explorar más gracias a diversos power ups metroidvanias que nos irán dando diferentes bosses.

Los objetos juegan un papel importante en este juego (a diferencia de otros metroidvanias), y es que se nos hará necesario muchas veces usar objetos para hacer nuestra experiencia más amena y sencilla. Esto es debido al alto factor soulslike que tiene Grime; las estadísticas, los mismos objetos, el nivel, y el equipamiento, son algunas de las cosas que se pueden desprender como influencia directa de los juegos de Fromsoftware, así también como algunas mecánicas de exploración ("no se abre de este lado"), e incluso apartados visuales claramente referenciados.

Este videojuego tiene fallos, es cierto; de vez en cuando nos encontramos con bugs menores, el apartado sonoro, si bien no es malo, tampoco es espectacular, pero si destaca, y, al inicio del juego, debido a nuestras pocas habilidades y movimientos, la jugabilidad queda un tanto tosca, así también como la exploración, además de una historia con narrativa implícita que si bien es sumamente cautivadora y enigmática, también es muy complicada de entender en una mirada superficial del juego, e incluso en una primera partida.
Aún así, Grime logra paulatinamente superar, o al menos, dejar de lado estos errores, para dejarnos con un juego que cumple su deber en ambos géneros, que tiene desafíos de combates espectaculares, y sectores de plataformeo bastante divertidos, que nos supondrán un reto que, a la par con escenarios y gráficos atractivos, será más que un mero videojuego del montón.

Grime is an underrated soulsvania

+ The combat is amazing with the unique parry/absorb system.
+ Enemy Variety
+ Magnificent art style and music.
+ Great level design that use well the mechanics you unlock
+ Over 10 incredibly good bosses
+ The free dlc added fast travel and sprint abilities so please people stop complaining about the traveling being slow.
- The final boss was too annoying for me so I dropped the game there.

Grime is abundant with rough edges but the core design is well done. There are great bossfights here (the Final Performance!) that are worth enduring some odd difficulty spikes and jank. The exploration rewards are fantastic, with tons of cool weapons to play around with. The amount of content here, paired with the surprisingly high level of graphical fidelity, make it bargain and a must play for fans of Soulslikes and Metroidvanias. The biggest shortcoming is the animation work which makes some of the movement & attacks feel floaty.

Grime is a Souls inspired Metroidvania that takes the wrong lessons from Souls. Combat is slow and ponderous, but also hard to read with unintuitive hitboxes and weirdly paced animations. The story is pretty original, but has a strong "find and replace" problem when it comes to terms cribbed from Dark Souls. Platforming feels clunky and imprecise. Overall this is a game where the two things you do the most (platforming and combat) feel unpolished and unsatisfying. This ruins the other elements, like exploration and lore hunting, which are otherwise decent enough.

Grime is an odd one for me. On one hand I think the grand majority of the game is not fun to play with little redeeming qualities. But on the other hand this game has some moments that are just REALLY good. This creates an odd experience where most of my time played is really not all that fun bordering on miserable occasionally but then it'll just hit me with some peak gaming ass moment. Very odd.

Getting the good stuff out of the way first Grime's boss fights are very good, early game bosses are at worst good and by late-game most of the bosses are phenomenal. The Final Performance specifically is SUCH an insanely good fight in every way shape and form, genuine masterpiece. I also wasn't fond of many of the set pieces this game had to offer but when they were good they were GOOD, the city near the end of the game being the biggest standout for me, I love the atmosphere of that area. The story beats near the end of the game were also pretty neat, which is odd when I normally couldn't care less about stories like this. I also really like how unique the movement upgrades feel, there's the obvious standard upgrades but some others that are super unique and well thought out and well integrated into combat. The parry is also awesome.

My biggest issues mostly stem from the "soulslike" inspiration this game has and how it falls into many of the pitfalls soulslikes tend to fall into. Let me preface this by saying I adore the original Dark Souls, phenomenal game. My issue is so many games try to replicate Dark Souls and inevitably have many shortcomings because of that. Things that normally wouldn't work in other games, like the lack of fast travel and extremely punishing checkpoints, work phenomenally in Dark Souls due to how well it's designed. If it sounds like I'm sucking off Dark Souls I am, the entire game industry has been sucking it off for around a decade now and Grime is no exception. Almost all of Grime's shortcomings stem from the souls design philosophy. Travel is annoying, even after getting fast travel. The space between checkpoints is unreasonably long leading to incredibly boring stretches of gameplay where you're trying to get back to where you were. Build diversity and experimentation technically exist but due to the weapon upgrade system and how respeccing works you're essentially locked into a specific build unless you want to go far out of your way to change it. Ambience instead of actual music for basically every area sucks (especially with how good the OST can be at points). And on top of that many of the areas are just kinda uninteresting due to the game's atmosphere & tone, which is especially weird considering how aesthetically interesting Grime is. All of these problems are rooted in the soulslike philosophy. Please stop trying to replicate Dark Souls, you're not him.

Outside of those problems there are a few other things I dislike. Most notably how stiff this game feels, in actual combat it's easy to get over with my biggest problem being how little stamina you seem to have (less of a problem lategame). But in platforming it can be VERY annoying, especially with how far back you'll respawn when you fail a platform challenge at points. While some platforming is genuinely satisfying the grand majority of it is kinda jank and not really fun. This problem becomes a lot bigger with the spaced checkpoints making platforming much more punishing than it needs to be. Even outside of the platforming I'm really not too big on the level design in general.

All of this comes together to create a game where despite the vast number of complaints I have I can't seem to give this game a negative score (5/10 isn't negative cry about it) due to those great moments really just being that good. I would even go out of my way to recommend this to people who are fans of the genre. I can honestly see myself playing Grime 2 when it releases due to the sheer potential this game has to be something great.

tldr peaks 9/10 but consistency 3/10

It started out a bit slow. The controls and movement felt too slow for the level design. But then I kind of got into it. It was a bit hard for me, but fair. Some of the boss battles were pretty tricky for me. Ultimately, they just came down to learning the attack patterns and dodge timing, but I am not great at that. Also, some of the platforming was tricky. But again fair. It almost had a "souls" like feel, although the leveling mechanic was kinder than a souls game (you didn't need to recover your souls when you died).

The story was weird, and not totally clear in the end. It is not a game you play for the story.

Overall, if you are into metroidvania like games, I think it is worth giving it a try.

Wasn't really feeling it initially due to the art direction, but it grew on me as the game went on as did the gameplay. The focus on parrying had me concerned at the beginning as I'm usually a dodge/block type of person when it comes to Soulslikes and Metroidvanias, but the window is generous enough that it never felt frustrating and by the end of the game I wasn't even attacking enemies at all and instead relied on the damage the parry was doing because it was a lot more fun. This is, in general, a surprisingly great Metroidvania with great bosses, fun traversal (when the full moveset is unlocked) and fantastic world design. The story kinda falls flat and the music is fine but largely unmemorable, but I think that's about all I dislike about the game? I'm genuinely surprised this flew under the radar. The sequel is definitely a day 1 purchase for me.

The game has some of the most unique art direction I've ever seen, the combat is satisfying and the platforming is challenging but never frustrating. It somehow manages to retain most of the mechanics of 3d soulslikes, like stamina, parrying, and weapon scaling, and feels just as 'complete' as its higher budget counterparts as a result. The bosses are simply perfect, with a difficulty curve so expertly designed that every single death felt like an incremental learning experience. A true gem, one of the best in this crowded genre.

played on steam deck - I rate the playability 4/5, some occasional stutters.

solid metroidvania with slow, methodical combat. i found the setting much more interesting than the mechanics.

personally, i have little patience for metroidvanias in concept. what makes my favorites work are either an amazing world worth backtracking through (Blasphemous or Hollow Knight) or a satisfying flow of movement and combat to keep my attention (Ori or Hollow Knight again).

Grime had the unique position that its rocky, murky, heavy atmosphere+world was so well tied thematically to its rocky, murky, heavy movement+combat that it made the whole more than the sum of its parts.

only for a while.
my lack of patience won out in the end, but i still recommend it and i'm very glad i checked it out