Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar (V2)

This game is dope as hell. It soo complex and obtuse that it actually makes me feel like i did when i played the old wizardy or might and magic games as a kid. But its definitely worth a look if you love those old games and want to play one with a ton of content.

Grimoire is really fun. You can ignore all the reviews saying it's unbalanced or too hard (it is unbalanced and it is pretty hard but you should ignore those reviews anyway). This is definitely a demanding game but it's really rewarding if you stick with it and has many deeper layers. Like an onion. Or an ogre. I played the demo of this on release and found it pretty rough but it's been smoothed out considerably with several patches since then. It's the only real successor to Wizardry 7 that manages to capture that game's weirdness, and its a helluva lot better than Bard's Tale 4. How many modern blobbers even are there? Just play Grimoire, it's great.

Interesting game with lots of fun systems, but ultimately ends up feeling like an exercise in tedium and save-scumming. Even at level four/five, random encounters one shot your weaker characters, so you end up save-scumming to keep them alive and not lose a permanent 10 CON from their attribute scores. It just becomes more tedium than fun at that point. This can be overcome by dumping your bonus points at char creation into hit points, but I am not in favor of having my choices restricted for viability.

An impressive amount of labor invested in making a very long classic Might & Magic style blobber. Any amount of which could have been invested in the UI, but wasn't. For example, you HAVE to look at the Golden Era Games logo for like a minute on boot every time. Can't skip that. For example, you can't tab out of this game. Also trying to do that broke my ability to open google chrome. I had to change my display settings to get it to start opening again and not just sit on the taskbar inaccessible. For example, tooltips are a sometimes food, and navigating any menu feels like operating a submarine in the 90s. All of this is kinda fine. This is an inaccessible genre, and it's not unreasonable for an especially indie game to be the final boss of that kind of inaccessibility. But I don't know if this thing had playtesters, or if any of them were ever listened to. Making a party is clunky, and you start the game with a custom party by going to 'library' for some reason. You need to max roll your bonus points for each character, and you probably want to invest those in HP. If you didn't do that, remake your party. Also you can't invest bonus points for the metalworker. I'm not sure why. Also unless you've already played the game, it's really hard to tell off the rip what the game wants. Character creation tells you so little. You'll land in the game and then realize that, oh, women of every species have +20% social and -20% strength. Men do not have any such modifiers because women are a modified type of man. I think. You *can* start to anticipate how this game thinks but the process involves hitting yourself in the head with hammers. Anyway, that's all fine. How's the gameplay? It. Is. Slow. It also has weird basic early blobber movement, where Q and E do not rotate and there is no strafe. But this is less of an issue than how long it takes a combat round to process. Your party also doesn't really start with appropriate weapons per class, and getting anything other than a chest in a side area requires going through The Bandits. You can beat The Bandits, but it's slow and obnoxious and they'll immune most of your attacks and you need to grind a bunch in a side area. And they're not telegraphed. Your first death will be you walked north a bit and got into a fight that you cannot run away from. What you should have done instead is go into the side area, the one that warns you not to go into it, and grind there. I like old school blobbers. I came up on Krynn. I love Betrayal At Krondor. Grimrock coming out gave me so much hope for the genre, even if the revolution ended up being more Wizardry and Beholderlikes than M&M. I don't mind games having weird dense mechanics that I need to stare at to unravel. There's a lot here that's cool, but you gotta be willing to hammer nails through your anatomy to get to it. I don't mind having spent money on this, and I'll try to push further in the hopes that maybe there's meat in this crab worth picking out, but I think to buy this confidently you need significantly higher jank tolerance than I've got. Best of luck to the dev. An impressive amount of work went into this thing. I wish it was slightly easier to pry enjoyment out. Edit 1: Following a guide now. Rebuilt my party. Apparently it's not just your bonus points that are rolled, but a bunch of things the game doesn't tell you it's rolling, so you have to kind of eyeball your starting values after taking your max rolled bonus points to see if you need to begin the whole rerolling process again. Also some classes? Characters? Something? Don't let you invest bonus points at start. I have no idea. This game makes so much information completely inaccessible to you. You can change your starting area in a field tucked up the butt of the settings menu. I bet playing this game goes crazy when you're the literal actual developer and you know how the stuff you've written is supposed to work. Edit 2: Five hours in and I have gotten past the bandits you can encounter within ten seconds of starting your save. Poison seems kind of essential, as they're tankier than the other enemies in the area that are both easier and have better exp rates. Also. The text speed. Might be genuinely why. I give up on attempting this game. I couldn't find an option for adjusting it, and because it's processing like a line of combat per two seconds and because the average attack either misses or hits for no damage and because you've got eight people in your party often with multi attack strings and the same is true for the enemies you're trapped in nothing is happening hell for like two minutes per round. There *has* to be a better way. Edit 3: Oh, the way class selection actually works (not explained) is deeply insane for no reason. Every class has (hidden) qualifier stat values that you need to have during creation to select them. And then, if you have fifteen bonus points left over after paying the class' cost (hidden) you get to assign those bonus points to hp. If not, they're lost. So, my question here is: What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. What. Edit 4: Comical amount of stuff that one-shots you once you're past the bandits. Which means you need to generate enough bonus points to get extra hp at creation. Which means you need to max roll your characters, and then know which professions you qualify for based on your race/class comp in order to be able to invest your bonus points. Which means the whole process of rolling your characters is Mr. Waste Your Time, because it's not something you *can* do to get a slightly stronger start, it's something you do to avoid having to restart. Edit 5: Yeah lmao I ain't finishing that. If what you crave is unapproachable blobbers, this is a genuine recommend. There *is* something here. But that something would still be here if the game was more playable. If you're not sure if this might be for you, play the classics. They are way, way easier to get into.

Game now works great as intended. The PDF works and is accurate. You can also find lots of community info and guides. The bugs mentioned in the negative reviews have been long patched. It's also just a really, really hard game (well, if you don't put a bard in your party). It's funny because it does remind me of Elden Ring in a way? In that, there are "optional difficulty settings" within the game. For example, the different starting locations offer different items that will greatly affect how easy the first few hours will be. And if you know where to find certain items or NPCs, then suddenly something will be much easier. Quality wise, no it's not Elden Ring. It's a 2.5D blobber RPG out of the early 2000s. But if you like Blobber PRGs, it will occupy 100+ hours of your time easy. Will it be fun? Just depends. I personally prefer Might and Magic 7/8 . I think this game is too obtuse. But I also dont like Wizardy 8. If you like Wizardry 8, you may like this.

I've completed this game twice. It can be so frustrating at times, and at other times so very enjoyable. I think the reason for this is - that the game is like a book with seven chapters, which you must read, before you can open the eight chapter, BUT - no matter where you choose to start the game, you have no information about anything -- and when you meet NPC's. who can give you information, you have to guess about said information, because of the games old school text based non-choice dialogue system. This system and the amount of frustration it can give, when first encountered is one of the reasons, imo, that the game is not all the way up there with it's inspirations, and one of the reasons new players might have a hard time getting to the games enjoyable parts. To help new players, I decided to make a mini guide, which should help getting into the game a little more comfy. In the following, which I try to make as breif as possible, I will point out the, imo, least frustrating way to start out and I will name some of the game play things which can frustrate. If you want to play the game without, don't continue reading after this.... * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Your "quest" in the game, is to complete seven different "levels", which will make it possible to gain access to the games eight "level", which is the end game. These "levels" are the different parts of the world, you enter when you start the game. The only fixed thing is, that you must complete the first "level", before you gain access to the other levels. From there - where you wanna go is up to you, and which part of the world, you want to visit is also up to you. Recommended preparations and good to know things before starting out: To ease the frustrations of the games old school text based non-choice dialogue system, I highly recommend to find a walkthrough. This way, which may seem odd, you'll not end up wasting game time and get so frustrated you throw the game out the window. When you create, your party - make room for one or two NPC'S. When you create your party - take time to study the manual, and plan ahead, so you can multi-class accordingly. When you create your party - I strongly advise to keep an eye on which characters has lethal blow and which characters has music. These are skills, you'll want as early as possible. Keep an eye on when your characters are about to hit level 9 or 10, and just before that change profession. That way, you don't need to grind like half a million xp. The open chest or locked door system is complicated and one of a kind. If you like puzzles - create a thief. If you don't like puzzles, don't make a thief, but use the spell "knock-knock" instead. In game - hold down ENTER to speed up combat. In game - BLESS restores lost "spirit". In game - "breadcrumps" (F7), are extreemly usefull. You drop them, and once you are far far away on a map, you just hit (F8), and can check your phone, while your party autowalks back to where you dropped them. In game - BEWARE that some encounters has skills which can 1) Kill you in one hit. 2) Make your armor or weapon dissolve. 3) Eat away you characters strength. If you find yourself the victim of 1 & 2, don't hessitate to use "endgame" and re-load, until you are either strong enough or have found a way to protect yourself. If you find yourself in a place where the encounters have 3 -- keep a backup save always. You can't see your characters strength beeing eaten in combat, so don't risk a lot of battles and then suddenly notice, your tank can't wear his armor anymore, because his/hers strength has been eaten away. Finally - make sure you have a main save and a backup save, and that you save your game often. Belive me you'll need it!!!

I was banned from his forum and my saves stopped working on update 3 but the blobber is good enough that I keep coming back. I probably deserved the ban, anyway.

A really, really good RPG in the vein of Wizardry. 20 years in the making, to deliver a spiritual successor to Wizardry 7! Truly one of a kind.

While I can't attest to the gripes of those with more hours, so far I'm enjoying it. I had to read the manual, which is something I haven't had to do in decades. It's an interesting game with a unique vibe, feels like a deep ocean of content so far. I've finally managed to not lose immediately, from a party I made myself no less. Feels good :) I'll attempt to update this when I have more hours.

TLDR: horrible quality of life, no soul, good soundtrack but terrible/badly implemented sound effects, seemingly complex but badly implemented system design, for diehards of the genre only. I have to preface this with: I never played blobbers as kid. I started playing games right as JRPGs started taking over the market and my initial experience with magic and hitpoints were the classic FFs and Pokemon essentially. Now that's not to say I haven't played Western RPGs, I have and I prefer them, but I don't come into this series with the nostalgia for Wizardry games that most I've seen talk about this game have. That being said, I heard about this project and about Cleve, and the vision for this game and was enthralled. I had no access to a computer as I was snowed in with my girlfriend at her place, so I read the 160 page manual and was very excited to start a run, plotted out my party and was anticipating a systems-heavy, retro gaming experience in a low-fi but detailed and vibrant world. What I got was a game that seems like it offers a lot of paths but really only rewards investment in a very narrow set of skills, to the point of the others being useless. Characters with lethal blow will carry your squad. The only stat that really matters is speed, as the rest can be upped through use of magic. I carried a thief for lockpicking (which requires two stats) but in reality you just need a sage/wizard who boosts their only relevant spellcasting skill and the spell knock-knock. So you can either have a thief (completely incompetent in combat, even at backstab and stealth until higher levels) who has to pump around 4 stats to even be mediocre, or you can have a wizard who is a god in battle, likely has even higher HP than your thief, and can unlock doors without any of the time consuming and honestly arcane minigames (if you can figure out what's going on in lockpicking without looking it up online, you're better than me). If you have a frontliner who doesn't have lethal blow they will be superior for about the first 2-3 hours of the game depending on stats, then will become quickly outclassed as your lethal blow characters kill everything in one hit fairly reliably. At that point, the game becomes purely about acting first, so whether you are a giant or a fey or a lizardman, or even any caster class, you'll just be pumping speed and letting your random attributes gained on level up take care of the rest of your stats until speed is maxed. You'll feel at first like you might be missing something by only upping 2-3 skills but then you'll realize that outside of a sage who takes care of most of the utility function of a party, or a thief who again is essentially worthless outside of robbery (good luck finding points to take robbery with if you need him for lockpicking though), there will be NO relevant skills outside of those 2-3, and 2-3 is being generous. A frontliner essentially only needs 1 skill and a few points in swimming or climbing. The puzzles are challenging in the sense that there is almost no information on where to go or what to do or why you would do any of it except that you're just adventurers who love adventuring. The dungeon-crawling amounts to casting detect secret at the highest level you can, going over every tile and resting when it wears off, rinse and repeat. I will say there's a lot in here if you want to take notes on every little thing, it will reward you if you can parse those notes to fit the game's (Cleve's) logic. But all of this i could more or less take. Battles are quick enough and exploration is interesting enough that I could deal with a game where I cheese to be good at combat to enjoy the puzzle solving and standard adventure encounters. Where this game will really destroy your will to play it is the simple quality of life stuff. There are almost no hotkeys for stuff like the map, journal, inventory, etc. If you can figure out how identify and assay work and are different from each other without looking online, you may be an actual clairvoyant. The journal does not in my experience provide any hints whatsoever at what you are trying to do in any case, so I would recommend taking the extra 20% experience to turn off journal hints. It just records prompts you've seen in game, which, fair enough, but sometimes you can get an item related to an NPC and have no idea at all. My personal least favorite part of the game are the sound effects. When in an encounter you will hear annoying incomprehensible sound effects ad nauseum. The sound that human bandits make in an encounter is so annoying i decided to start playing with headphones so I could mute every fight with them easier -- and they will make that sound roughly 50 times in a 2-3 minute fight. The way characters spasm and dance on screen when you're interacting with them is so odd that it's comical. Why would a blacksmith be doing a weird jig when I come into his shop to buy stuff? You may think or have heard this is a modern reimagining of a blobber with retro graphics but updated systems and quality of life improvements, but no. it is a blobber from the early 90s released in 2018, and doesn't do any of the work on systems design, sound design, writing, or core gameplay to justify a modern audience with so many better options playing it for any length of time. Also, the difficulty is talked up a lot so I decided to play it on novice and I have to say, while I am cheesing it, it isn't hard at all outside of the first few fights before you know how combat works. Unless you are the hardest core Wizardry/blobber fan (in which case you probably already have and love this game) I can't in good conscience recommend this to anyone.