GRUNND

I’m a sucker for noir, detective and point & click games, so the tags for this game really peaked my interest. However I learned pretty quickly that this game was not what I had thought from reading the game tags. There isn’t much to explore and not very many puzzles to solve. However I’m not dissatisfied with the product What I got was instead a cosy interactive story, with great voice acting. And the story was definitely captivating enough to keep me playing all the way to the end. The ending however left me wanting for more, except the fact that the ending felt very rushed, I feel like I had more to do on the Island. And the game crashed when I was picking the ending I wanted. And I cannot seem to go back to a previous save and try out the other endings. Hopefully this is fixed in a later patch. I’m really excited to know how this ends.

The art is beautiful, pacing is slow and melancholic. If like an eerie and not to action filled story this is for you. What I like: Nice VO and dialogue Nice art direction Interesting narrative What I dont like: Maybe too slow from time to time I wished the dialogue options had a larger impact on how the narrative unfolded. Right now it feels as if the player only control the order the dialogue is player out.

Grunnd is a point and click adventure game with no adventure and poorly implemented pointing and clicking. I'll be up front and say I did not like this game. I enjoy surreal and interpretive works like Pathologic or Who's Lila?, but this was a slog to get through. It feels like half of a game. I can put aside the short length (3 hours), but the ending choices felt rushed. I didn't care about any of the "characters" and really had no reason to care. Most of them blatantly refuse to answer your questions and are so off-putting that I could care less what fate besets them. The jank of this game is unbelievable. The "Hero" (that's what he's called) will just walk in place randomly, walk back and forth desperately trying to figure out how to walk down some stairs and moves with all of the speed of a crippled sloth. The movement is agonizingly slow. You can fast travel almost anywhere any time and it makes for some unintentionally bizarre moments. Interacting with the wide open gate to the "farm" will cause the narrator to still comment on how it can be opened from the other side. When I grabbed the ticket from the outpost, went down the elevator, and came back up, it reappeared in the slot to be picked up again. Going down the one way elevators, upon fast traveling up the hill again, the elevator was reset. This game is a mess. Indie or not, there is a supreme lack of polish here. Almost every line of dialogue is voiced, but then dialogue will appear with no voice acting when everything else is voiced. Many lines of dialogue will not match the voiced lines and are often littered with grammatical and spelling errors. The controls are atrocious. Clicking to move is finnicky and interacting with prompts seems to work 50% of the time. In dialogue, lines will sometimes just flow on their own, but then randomly will require me to click "Continue" to get the next line of dialogue. Why? The keypad got stuck on screen at one point requiring a save reload. The game got stuck loading indefinitely requiring a full restart. Even when the game is working, it's just not fun, compelling, scary, funny, just boring. It's a tedious experience overall. There are moments of tension that had me hooked, but it just never goes anywhere. It's always just a little eerie, but the moment fades before there can be any payoff. Details about the setting, characters, and story are drip fed so slowly and in such a fragmented manner that it's hard to stay invested when almost nothing is revealed. Entire plot points seem to just disappear from relevance all together. Why did the fortune teller say she'd help me later when that never happens? Why was there a dark cave in the side of the mountain that I can't enter? Why does everyone comment on how the outpost lacks any doors, but I still have the ability to enter it? How did "Hero" even get in? He mentions there aren't even any windows either. What were the trash collectors doing with their victims? It's like an assortment of secrets that just stay as secrets. No climax or resolution. The biggest issue I have with "Hero" is that he's the gateway to this strange dreamlike/nightmarish little town, but I can't put myself in his shoes. He'll be just as confused as we are making it easy to connect with him, but then he'll just say and do weird ♥♥♥♥ for whatever reason I can't fathom. Why would he ask some guy he just met to join him at an inn? Why is talking to some woman holding a baby we've never met previously like he knows her? I don't know her. He's just as much of a weirdo as everyone else. Pathologic worked because the Bachelor was just as much of an outsider as we are. He's easy to connect with. For the positives, the voice acting is mostly good, sometimes awful. The narrator is very good. He does his job well. The man at the disco was terrible. It's like he was switching inflections at random while talking. The boy, bless his heart, spoke like he's just reading words without understanding what they mean. The art style is very beautiful. It feeds into the bleak neo-noir atmosphere of the game. There's a lot of thick shading to everything and it reminds me of Disco Elysium a bit, but much darker. There are issues here as well with bugged animations and weird scaling. The bouncer at the disco looks massive when he's guarding the door, but then is normal size when he's outside. The soundtrack is incredibly atmospheric and tense. A lot of good ambient tracks that helped with the immersion. However, that metal track was just jarring and felt out of place. Grunnd is just a little too vague for my taste and with all of the jank, it's a hard sell. Multiple endings to an unpleasant experience doesn't undo the tedium of playing the game just to get there. It's just not something I'd ever play again and I can't in good faith recommend something I didn't enjoy. (4/10)

It’s a story-driven philosophical journey, high on style and ambiguity and a bit low on polish. I enjoyed my time with it, but it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. What really worked: - Aesthetics. The visuals are lovely here, in an imaginative and dark sort of way, and I appreciated this style full of stark shapes layered on top of the contrasting colors of the backgrounds. It “kinda, sorta” reminded me of The Cat Lady (visually), but it’s a thing of its own ultimately, and it does convey a specific mood. - This mood is a part of an atmosphere that managed to stay part somber part mysterious all the way through. Confusing a bit, but very evocative - the game’s strongest point, in my opinion. It’s very melancholic, but also sinister and sometimes sad, sometimes chilling… The overall ambiance is fantastic. - The soundtrack is minimal but playing into the overall impression splendidly. Just enough to keep the all the parts of this machine rolling while not being overwhelming. It’s one of those moments where I imagined the composer holding specific notes for a long amount of time – nothing complex, but when the notes are right – everything fits together like a puzzle. - Voice-over is certainly on point. I’m glad that SEKTAHOUSE when this route, even though I’m sure it cost them a lot. It just elevates everything to a whole other level and makes it worth it. At least for the player. What was “meh”: - Puzzles, or almost entirely lack thereof, for a “handcrafted point’n’click adventure” (from description). It is a mostly straightforward journey as far as the game progression goes, so while there are few “puzzles” strewn around, it’s a story-centric game in which you go through the motions the game wants you to, featuring a couple of “get this and give it to so and so”. Could be very much by design, so this may be a draw to some. - Lack of fast-walking or double-clicking to exit the screen. Again, could be very much by design, as this could set the pace the developer wanted for a player to follow, but I found myself wanting to have those options even when I was “in the mood” of the game. - Two save slots that, for some reason, didn’t change (visually) when I saved. There was a sound, but I couldn’t manually rename the slots, so I was just hoping my saving worked. Visual cue or ability to name it would’ve been great. What didn’t quite work: - The overall vagueness of… well, everything. I very much enjoy surrealistic games, but they tend to work better when there’s a thread of cohesiveness (however loose) to relay the story born in developer’s head to the player. I must be able to pick-up on what is being told, otherwise it quickly becomes “all style, no substance” situation. While GRUNND does have a set of steps I had to follow to complete it (avoiding being totally baffling), I still have no idea who was the hero, why he was where he was, who are all these people he met and why are they there; and after that ending – what happened at all? What was the story that I was being told through this game? I needed something more to fully enjoy this, an element that I can grab onto, maybe, to start speculating… But I was pretty lost in all this moody landscape. - Bugs, of which there are enough to warrant mentioning in the review. I came across a few soft locks; then there was a puzzle that didn’t leave the screen when I wanted to stop solving it, so it just stayed there until I used a map to travel to a different location; there are quite a few moments like when the hero passes next to an open door, but if you click on it, he’ll say that it’s shut; there are pathing issues everywhere, especially inside the Farm around the stairs, where the hero gets stuck and/or walks in different directions instead of going up or down. Just some rough around the edges moments that could have been ironed out if the game was in development for a little longer. Ultimately, to be fantastic GRUNND could have used a bit more time in the oven, baking away all the lack of polish, and it definitely could have used more unity in its storytelling. I’m giving it thumbs-up because the atmosphere was wholesome, and I think this developer has a lot of potential to pull off something truly spectacular next time (and I really hope there’s next time), but as it stands - it is an enjoyable but flawed game, where the set-up is enticing but the execution is slightly trailing off the track not quite living up to what this game could have been - at least according to my own expectations. Gotta add though, that as far as the atmosphere – this is a melancholic candy, so if you’re craving that above all, GRUNND has got you covered. Now you can ponder in style.

I gave it an hour. Mainly because the noir-esque atmosphere and the music were promising me potential. But everything else is best described with the word "janky". Movement is slow and imprecise, which together with confusing hotspot interactions (sometimes left-click instead of right-click is necessary, sometimes correct positioning of the character is necessary, sometimes there is no hotspot or it is not near the point you are ultimately interacting with -- in one word: janky) makes for a frustrating gameplay experience. The dialogue, again, is janky. Voiceover often does not match the written text and sometimes the same character is voiced entirely differently (best example is the very first NPC you meet, which sometimes sounds as if speaking through a radio and sometimes as if standing beside you). The dialogue choices feel underdeveloped and pointless, as you have to click on all of them anyway and the replies do not necessarily match the questions. It's not as bad as Solasta's dialogue randomizer, but it feels disjointed too often not to be noticable and irritable. Quest design is strange as well. Less than an hour in I got access to an island, where something happened that clearly communicated to the player that the way back was cut off. Except, it wasn't. Maybe there was a hidden trigger, but I just progressed normally on the island and surrounding places, when I realized that fast travel was still possible and moved me to the starting locations. Similarly, a large structure that "has no door" turned out to be accessible immediately (again: hidden trigger?) just by walking to its left and pressing the arrow, apparently teleporting me inside that "structure without a door" without any explanation. It's just so confusingly janky. Once I felt that I was losing interest amidst all the gameplay confusion, I stopped playing and likely will not return. Not sure how many hours are left, but considering the game is actually quite pricy for its content, I feel that this was a buy that I will regret. A shame.

It tries very hard in some regards. The art style, music, Lynchian atmosphere, some story-related flexibility, and, at times, the voice acting. But it also fails in many fields, oftentimes in ways that impair the experience significantly. The tremendous amount of bugs, junk, awkward controls, lacking UI, terrible - at other times - voice acting, typos, grammar issues, voiced text differing from the written one, and sometimes displaying no real direction forward hinders the overall experience. I'd recommend the game to very specific players who look at the screenshots with awe and are willing to endure countless technical issues. But I must admit, I wasn't able to stay immersed, and I really wanted to.

I like the atmosphere, the weird strangeness to things - the horror without resorting to gore. I think I can piece together enough of what happens in the main story to make some sense. Sadly, the technical issues range from "I didn't actually talk with another character about a topic, now being referenced" to I can't complete the game. One task in the pause menu is stuck and every time I enter the place with the ticket dispenser, I can pick it back up but no trains arrives anywhere...

A good game that delivers on its promise so far. An imersive point and click fever-dream that instantly makes you wonder about the nature of the story. + Atmosphere + Beautiful + Creepy - A bit slow - I would like the already used dialogue choices to light up again when the yield new results - I would like a hint button for when i just want to get through a hard-read logic puzzle

If you're looking for a moody and atmospheric game I would recommend you to check out Grunnd. It gives you that cozy, mysterious and melancholic feeling that you would find in the works of David Lynch. It's a point and click adventure, filled with strange characters and mystery. The pacing is quite slow and there are a lot of dialogue to be had, which of most are pretty well voice acted. The controls can be a bit janky at times but since it's not a fast paced action game it doesn't hurt the overall experience.

Neural network saw first couple of seconds of intro to [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VijlYkLFdAk]Riget[/url] (Kingdom 1997) and mixed it in with previews of Cat Lady and Disco Elysium, and then this came out.