Secrets of Grindea

Would I recommend Secrets of Grindea? Yes, BUT only to certain players. Secrets of Grindea is a strange game to review because it is not bad, but it is also not as good as it could have been. It has many genuinely fun parts, but also some painful design choices that made me question whether I should recommend it at all. In the end, I do recommend it, but with some strong warnings. The combat system is fun at its core. The game has satisfying attacks, active skills, spells, dodging, blocking, summons, buffs, and enough mechanical depth to make fights feel engaging. The passive skill tree is also well made and has some genuinely good ideas. Exploration, puzzles, treasure hunting, dialogue, side content, monsters, level design, music, and the overall charm of the world are also strong points. The game has a cozy old school ARPG feeling, and when it works, it really works. However, the balance is awful. The game gives you many active skills and build options, but a lot of it feels like an illusion of choice. Only a handful of spells and active skills actually stay useful later in the game, and many builds become painful or outright bad. I played a warrior/melee build, and while it was fun early on, it felt like one of the worst ways to play the game later. The game slowly turns into a bullet hell simulator, and pure melee becomes miserable. Boss fights often turned into waiting forever for a tiny opening, getting a few hits in, then dodging for several minutes again. Some fights dragged on for 20 min or more, and by the end I had to rely on specific potions and summons just to get through it. If you enjoy summoner builds, you will probably have a much better time. Summons let you stay back, avoid most of the bullet hell chaos, and rebuff occasionally. Almost every other style, especially melee, feels much worse. Warrior gameplay also becomes exhausting because you constantly have to dodge, attack, heal, buff, rebuff, manage cooldowns, and avoid projectiles all at once. It starts feeling less like an ARPG and more like playing the keyboard like a piano. I think buffs should have lasted longer, cost more, and taken longer to recharge. That would have made the gameplay feel more deliberate instead of turning every fight into constant key management. The game also has way too much grinding. Getting all achievements and cards felt faster than getting some basic monster drops, which makes no sense. Some drop rates are ridiculously overtuned, and you can spend one or two hours farming a useless item just for completion. I understand rare cards being rare, but random monster drops being even more annoying to get just feels stupid. The game could probably be completed with "100% Completionist achievement" much faster and feel much better if the pointless item grind was reduced. The art is also inconsistent. I like the atmosphere, the environments, the monster design, and most of the pixel art. The world is charming and fun to explore. But some character portraits look awkward, ugly, or badly proportioned, and they can pull you out of the experience when they appear on screen. It is not enough to ruin the game, but it is noticeable. Overall, Secrets of Grindea has a great foundation. The vision is genuinely good, and there is a lot of charm here. But the balance, grind, and build design hold it back hard. I would recommend it if you like old school ARPGs, pixel art, exploration, puzzles, completionist content, and especially summoner style gameplay. I would not recommend it if you hate grinding, want every build to feel equally viable, or plan to play pure melee and fully complete the game. It is a fun but flawed ARPG. Not amazing, not terrible. Just very mid, with some really good parts and some really annoying ones. Score: 7/10

Fun game, but missable content is a thorn in my side. It's uncool to have to resort to a guide to make sure you get all the achievements etc.

Шедевр, долгое время пылившийся в бета версии! Спасибо Тиджою и Рекви, это моё детство, моя любовь

Grinding, grinding and more grinding.

I liked the demo enough to buy the game when it wasn't on sale, which is quite a feat for my cheapskate self.

I really liked this...at first. I kinda of assumed there'd be more point to grinding at first but it's just not really there. After a while the grind investment to reward ratio started to get really skewed and after my 9th time running around in an area for several hours to grind 1% drops for equipment I'll probably never use my opinion started to sour. By the time I decided to just not bother with grinding drops anymore the game had already overstayed its welcome by that point. It CAN be fun based on your playstyle but it went from good to bad too quickly for me.

Took nine years, but I beat it. The combat and progression are just complicated enough to be fun and satisfying. The writing was surprisingly good! Respects your time more than you'd think, but has a lot to do if you choose to go deep.

这个类型是我这辈子玩过最好玩的游戏，总有人说不更新但其实作者一直更新来着，觉得刷卡片太牢的可以开修改器刷...剧情战斗方面我特别喜欢，十分推荐！

I might update this later, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ are the puzzles in this game so tedious, time consuming, and not fun to play. Yeah. I just can't. This was going to be a positive review, honestly. However, the puzzles these guys cooked up are just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible. Pixel perfect timing works if you're a developer with the chops to make it work. When you don't do it right - which you did not - it is just a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ absolutely infuriating mess. I genuinely don't understand how developers make these mistakes anymore. It's juvenile at this point. There are too many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ video games out there done correctly for me to tolerate this sort of insipid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anymore. Your game isn't based on movement. Stop making movement based puzzles. What is wrong with you? Why would you try and make movement puzzles with the tightest timing when your game does not play like a game meant for complex movement? There's a hundred games doing this correctly - Why did you fail? Why didn't you look at 100 other examples of this style of puzzle that works? Crosscode is a great example. Want to know what they did before they made movement based puzzles? They figured out and fine tuned their movement within the entire game. You just slapped a bunch of random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanics together, polished the ♥♥♥♥ you liked and left the rest in to piss all of us off, it feels like. You tried, you didn't succeed. Combat is unbalanced, like every other negative review has stated. It's tuned for magic completely, you need room clearing spells and moves because any form of reasonable methods of farming are accompanied by ever increasing spawn rates, so no matter what you do the end result is the exact same, massive amounts of enemies. That's it. I could accept this if the combat was fun. It's not. It is another ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game with too many abilities and not enough buttons for them all. I hate being forced into using a controller because the developer was probably too busy beating off to their movement puzzles to worry about making decent controls that would give a purpose to the amount of skills and abilities you can acquire. (half of which are pointless.) You had a great opportunity for an amazing story, too. I will give credit where it's due, it's certainly not a bad story for what it is, literally being based on the concept of grinding. Had you put a bit more into your atmosphere or storytelling maybe it would've made the aggravating parts - the gameplay - more fun. Overall what we have here is another swing and another miss. Another to sit on top of my growing pile of "What could have been." Don't recommend. The negatives have completely soured any and all positives for me.

Fun game