Grime is metroidvania meets dark souls in a lovecraftian-esque twisted setting. This game drops you deep into the world to rise up to where you had fallen. As a monstrosity with a black hole for a head, your goal is to work your way up through each of the unique areas to the land above and to remember your past. Destroy and absorb all that oppose you in this interesting and unique game!
Visuals and Music:
Visuals on this game are extremely odd and that’s a good thing. There are a ton of interesting designs of NPCs and creatures that scatter this twisted world. Long elongated arms, tentacles, and contorted shapes frequently appear in the creatures of this universe. Love the artwork and design in this game.
Music and audio is on point with creepy high pitched or deep rumbling voices from npcs keep the tension up and feed into the vibe of the game. Music does a good job with an eerie soundtrack with escalating crescendos when finally absorbing an enemy that you spent multiple attempts to defeat.
Story:
The story for the game is fairly straightforward. Defeat enemies and absorb their remains to become more powerful. I feel like a vast majority of the story beats do happen late game. This causes the main backstory of your character to happen all in one section, which I felt it would have been much better spread across the game, allowing me to piece together my past. I do enjoy the characters and the smaller beats of story that do happen in each of the individual sections, so overall, I found the story pretty good.
That’s a big guy…. 
Stats and perks
Gameplay:
Grime’s combat is very well done with the dark souls esque style with tons of weapons with unique animations. Combat is punishingly difficult, and as a long time souls fan, I found it more frustratingly difficult than most of the souls games. You get a meter of breath to heal but can only hold 2 breaths(heals) at a time (excluding using items), which you can refill the meter by parrying abilities with absorbs or killing enemies with one of the perks.
Stats and upgrades are really well done with the ability to gain new perks based on enemies you have absorbed. DIfferent weapons will benefit from different stats based on the playstyle you want to use. Armor is strictly cosmetic with a few pretty cool designs. Personally I wish that armor was not cosmetic only and had unique armor values so you could set a more solid playstyle.
Since this is a metroidvania game, it has plenty of platforming which I think is well done. Plenty of interesting abilities to traverse the sprawling tunnels and to get to hard to reach places for items. I did have a few glitches where I would teleport beneath the world when dashing, but for the most part graphical bugs and glitches didn’t mess up my gameplay.
Items galore…. 
The faceoff
Overview:
Grime is a great dark and twisted metroidvania that I do recommend for metroidvania fans, but with a caution that this game is very punishing and difficult. The game has beautiful visuals and a soundtrack to go with it. Story is good, but could do better with it’s pacing. Gameplay is really good, but could do with a bit more in depth armor system. Nearing the end of the game, I did experience more issues with bugs, which I do feel the game could take a bit more polishing. Overall, it’s a great twisted game and definitely recommend it.
Rating: 4/5
The game is available on GFN and on Stadia via Stadia Pro.
Check out our Grime gameplay videos on Youtube!
