Legend of Grimrock

K. Fields
2025-04-05T12:06:34-04:00
Video Games

After playing a few shorter video games, I took on one with a bit more length. It was Legend of Grimrock, a role-playing game with an old school feel. It would have been at home in the late 1980s or early 1990s alongside such titles as Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder. There is a backstory but Grimrock is not a story driven game. The setting is Mount Grimrock, a prison within the mountain. You play as a group of four prisoners deposited at the top of the prison. Your goal is to work your way downward in pursuit of escape. In typical fantasy RPG fashion, Grimrock is filled with monsters and loot. As expected, that means it is largely combat driven. However, Grimrock includes a significant amount of puzzles. There are secret areas to be found, traps to avoid, and various obstacles to overcome outside of combat. Solving some of these could be quite frustrating. Precise timing manipulating levers, switches, pressure plates, and trap doors was required.

I decided to play as the stock party: human fighter Contar Stoneskull, minotaur fighter Mork, human rogue Yennica Whitefeather, and human mage Sancsaron. By the end of the game, my party was level 13 to 14. Grimrock's magic system was a little different. It was based on runes. You needed to find scrolls to discover the proper combination of runes to cast a given spell. Combat was real-time so you needed to get proficient clicking on the different runes to cast spells quickly. There were also scrolls listing ingredients to craft potions.

Despite some frustration, I had fun playing Legend of Grimrock. It certainly wasn't my favorite RPG but I enjoyed it enough to keep playing to the end.