Legend of Grimrock

[Unkillable Cat]

Ugh... I heard talk about a good Grimrock mod, thought I'd check it out. "Toorum's Manor" has the party visiting the manor of Toorum the Battlemage (I thought he was a Ranger?) which is built atop an old haunted mine. The party is sent there because nothing has been heard from Toorum for quite a while.

I made it as far as Level 3 in earnest before giving up, this mod is horribly designed.

= It's a story-based mod, but I'm not exactly seeing much depth to the story, mostly it's just the party commenting on things.
+ It has around 25 levels, making it one of the larger mods released so far.
+ It adds some new items, including a melee weapon that's actually useful to a rear-rank Mage.
- It also screws things up a bit by having seperate ammo for seperate bows. Those steel arrows will only work in steel bows, and that Elven bow will only fire Elven arrows.
- The writing is in Engrish, which presents extra challenges when solving the puzzles.
- Spells are unchanged, but you MUST first find the scroll to "learn" the spell. Pointless.
= This mod is not for a new party, as the difficulty is all over the place. It's alright at the start, discounting the fact that your party takes constant damage from the cold. A few encounters with small critters, then suddenly tougher monsters start spawning quite rapidly all around you. Just as you find the first life crystal, you open the nearby door and... Ogre in your face. In that same room are stairs going up AND down. What's beyond them? 1 Ogre beyond each. That's 3 Ogres within 10 steps of one another.
- Then once you reach the Catacombs (Level 3) you get Undead Legionaires and Archers spawning all over the place in large numbers.
+ It does have at least one new monster, a slobbering beholder-type creature. Caught me off-guard when I first met it.
- It's stupidly easy to miss out on game-vital items. Over at the Grimrock forums a recent user asked how he could get back to the start of the mod to retrive an item. The designer's answer?

I never thought that the player did not pick up the whitewood wand in the 1st level, as it can be useful for a mage, before you get something greater. Why did you not pick it? There is no way to return back to level 1 after you enter the manor.

Which would be a fair point, if the item in question wasn't pretty cleverly hidden. Seriously, an average player will have to try to force his way into every square to have a chance to find this item.
- But by far the worst thing about this mod are the traps. There are the usual "step-on-a-plate-and-a-demon-head-spits-stuff-at-you" that are usually not a problem. But there are also boulder traps, and these INSTAKILL your party. What's worse, they're in long narrow passages, meaning your only choice is to outrun the boulder, and they appear WITHOUT WARNING. Absolutely NOTHING about the environment even suggests what's about to happen, and they're set up so that you have a second at the most to react before SPLAT!. I've run into two of these traps now, and they completely kill this mod for me.

This mod is just too crap to be worth the time. I also strongly question the mental health of the designer.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I am forced to revise the above review. I was asked to continue playing this mod, or actually to restart it because a new version was just released this week. Seems that the mod is still a "work-in-progress", so I think I'll use the opportunity to try to have those boulder traps removed altogether.

When I last quit, I had reached the last parts of Level 3 of the dungeon. In my second playthrough I am now in a side-dungeon accessible from Level 9. This mod does pick up quite a bit if you give it a chance. Some further notes of mine:

# So far there are 2 new enemies. The aforementioned beholder that floats around lazily comes in 2 types: Fireball-blasting or lightning-blasting. It's about medium-tough as far as monsters go. And then there are the bee swarms. Oh God, not the bees! These things are probably the hardest monsters I've encountered in any Grimrock mod. They hit harder than Ogres and are tougher than Juggernauts, easily causing hundreds of points of damage when they hit. At least they're not very fast, falling back and blasting them with fireballs seems to work...until you run out of room. There also seem to be varieties of bee swarms, but I can't tell if there's any real difference between them.

# Monsters are spawned throughout the dungeon based on your travels. Sometimes they're spawned RIGHT BEHIND YOU to try to get a scare out of you. My party has just reached Level 22 and has read more stat-enhancing books than you can shake a library at, so most of the time I'm not even bothered when fighting 4 Ogres at a time. But this mod is marked as "Start with a fresh party" while the author himself is too scared to try to play it on Hard difficulty. Yeahhhhh.. that's gonna need some work.

# There are new spells. Hasten Party, Berzerk, Mage Light (create a stationary torch in a square), Heal Party, Freeze Enemy (a more powerful version of the Frozen Shards spell) are the ones I've come across.

# However, spells are distributed badly throughout the dungeon. At first you're barely getting by with the basic spells for each school, but when you reach the teleporter hub on Level 4 you're suddenly handed out all of the "standard" spells of the game at once, with only the new spells being left to discover.

# There are some really cool visuals popping up now and again. Remember the scene from Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade where Indy has to cross a bottomless chasm with no bridge? You get that here. It looks REALLY cool. The author also mixes tilesets indiscriminately, but it doesn't come out as bad as one would think. I've also seen one new tileset, based off of Dungeon Master, even down to the diamond-shaped buttons.

# Speaking of bottomless chasms, the first piece of advice I'd give for this mod is: "Fall down every pit you come across." Seriously. There's one pit early on that goes down 3 floors so that might kill an inexperienced party, but otherwise there's ALWAYS something down there to reward one's effort. I've yet to come across a death-pit. The only instakill traps are the boulder traps, of which I've found 3 so far. (Level 2, 3 and 9. In two cases they can be spotted by a sign of several rocks lying on the square where the boulder spawns from, keep an eye out for that.)

# This mod isn't big, it's HUGE. The author speaks of 25 levels. That may be, except one of the side-dungeons I've found so far is marked as Level 51 on the map! But a downside is that the author breaks one of the unwritten rules of grid-based blobbers: He puts in inaccessible areas, adds doors that are never meant to be opened. Creating content that is never meant to be used. I find that to be sloppy. Maybe it's because the author has unimplemented plans, but it's something I'm gonna try to learn more about.

# The level design is alright so far. The first 3 levels involve a lot of backtracking, but things smooth out a bit after that. Level 8 starts seeing a sharp increase in puzzles, especially various mazes, and right now Level 9 is reminding me of the minecart chase from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - only without the carts.

# As for the author's apparent lack of mental health? That was me being way too harsh on a non-native English speaker. The mod badly needs a proficient English proofreader.

My verdict this time is: Keep an eye on this mod. I wouldn't play it right now (V1.39) for many reasons, but hopefully it won't be long until this mod has reached a good balance.

 

[Elwro]

I just reached the final boss. I have no idea how the designers thought the boss-related stuff would be fun.

Since I guess everybody else has played this, I won't hide the few spoilers below.

First: are there any clues as to what items you should bring from downstairs to assemble the boss? I admit I had to check the net for that.
Second: you have to assemble the boss yourself and the designers of the dungeon should've just thrown all the items away or destroyed the, say, infusor (the smallest part), if the whole thing was supposed to be a prison. Have I missed some plot explanation for this?

Alright, back to navigating dozens of respawning enemies in order to stop the thing I just (had to) set in motion.

 

[Metro]

Final boss wasn't the best but fairly appropriate in a grid based real time blobber. Not like the final boss in EOB was interesting -- you just used a wand to push him into a trap.

 

[Elwro]

Yeah, but he wasn't as tedious as Grimrock's. Do you really need to determine the needed pieces by trial & error?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Elwro: The game is supposed to tell you what pieces are needed. Pick up a piece and put it in your inventory and hold the mouse cursor over it. A message from the voice should shortly appear to tell you whether the part is needed or not.

IIRC there is no plot explanation as to why the prison is housed on top of a storage room full of spare parts.

And while the "correct" way to kill the EOB endboss was to use a wand to push it into a trap, you could also just attack it until it dies. REALLY clever players would abuse the AI and make the endboss go into the trap by itself.

 

[Elwro]

Elwro: The game is supposed to tell you what pieces are needed. Pick up a piece and put it in your inventory and hold the mouse cursor over it. A message from the voice should shortly appear to tell you whether the part is needed or not.

Goddamnit, I thought I tried that. Thanks!

 

[Baron Dupek]

Holymolly I though it was Grimoire thread made cause it was already released.
Almost got panic attack.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Elwro: The game is supposed to tell you what pieces are needed. Pick up a piece and put it in your inventory and hold the mouse cursor over it. A message from the voice should shortly appear to tell you whether the part is needed or not.

Goddamnit, I thought I tried that. Thanks!

There is one possibility... are you using Komag's "Master Quest" mod? I remember that when I played it that this was the only feature that Komag had removed. But then again Komag rejigged the boss fight in several ways to make it much harder, so...

 

[Elwro]

Nope. I must just be dumb.


I'd still say it's a fun game and I'll consider trying the Toorum mode some time... but I'll take a second (or third, if you count the 90s) shot at Lands of Lore 1 first

 

[Metro]

Toorum mode is actually easier since you only have one guy to worry about and his speed is increased.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

So the hype around LoG2 made me wanna try the first part...

The gang is back!

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

No guns in LoG1. You won't be able to shotgun!

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D. appears to be a minotaur as well...

Without the shotgun for Thornton Reed this isn't really going to be "canon"...

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Just finished this thing... It seemed like it was over too soon? I was just getting hyped over hitting 50 in some skills too...

Minotaur fister / human rogue with assassination were pretty fun to use. I did end up spending some skills carelessly though...

2x2 strafe dancing combat was too easy. They should've had at least 1 enemy immune to strafing. Overall atmosphere/exploration were great but 2 tilesets for the majority of levels is really lame... Especially when you're OCD looking for hidden switches.

Anyway... My party at the end:

Spoiler

 

[catfood]

Does anyone know if there are any good mods/maps for this game?

 

[Gord]

Does anyone know if there are any good mods/maps for this game?

Look a few pages back, Unkillable Cat has reviewed a few of them. I just tried "The Mine of Malan Vael", which is a short-ish but p. good one.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I thought to myself the other day "I wonder if any decent LoG1 dungeons have been released recently?"

I went and reinstalled LoG1, dug up a nice-looking dungeon and started with a fresh party.

Two things struck me pretty quickly.

The first one is that LoG1 has now been rendered obsolete. Short of the title music in LoG1, LoG2 is superior in EVERY WAY. Classes, races, skill system, UI, interface, everything. Going back to LoG1 feels like playing an AD&D 2nd Ed game today, needlessly restrictive to the point of absurdity. Whatever assets are absent from LoG1 can easily be imported into LoG2. I'm pretty certain I could import the title music with but a fileswap. But anyway, back to the mod at hand.

This is "Back to the Dungeon" which proclaims to be a near-perfect rendition of Dungeon Master in the Grimrock engine. I'm no DM expert, but I'm familiar enough with it to be able to give at least a valid opinion. And it looks to be a very faithful port of DM. It does start with some bad Engrisch, but the DM tileset for Grimrock looks great. You get the Hall of Champions, and while you can create a party in this mod, you can switch any of them out for the DM champions. Dead characters will likewise have to be returned to the re-animation chamber. In fact, I'm gonna say BttD is too faithful of a port.

The biggest difference between BttD and Grimrock is that Grimrock's doors only take up a line of a square, not the entire square. BttD does NOT alter its maps to take this into account which makes a few locations look odd and silly. Another notable difference is that EVERY LOCK IN BTTD LOOKS THE SAME. This may have been a thing with Dungeon Master back in 1987, but every grid-based dungeon crawler for the past 25 years has been able to overcome this, including this "as-is" is overzealousness in the DM faith. 10 minutes in and I had found 5 different keys and only trial and error could tell me which key opened which lock. They've also taken measures to remove animations and sounds from things such as walls disappearing/reappearing. Sadly I'm afraid that I can't recommend this mod to anyone but the die-hard Dungeon Master fans. You see, despite a 16-year hiatus between 1996 and 2012, the grid-based dungeon crawler genre has come a LONG WAY since Dungeon Master burst onto the scene. Trying to create a near-perfect rendition of such a dated game in a modern engine such as Grimrock feels like a disservice to both games.

This should serve as a small note of warning to anyone who's considering porting an old grid-based dungeon crawler into Grimrock; there's no reason to be too faithful to the original. Learn and understand what changes should (and should not) be implemented in the port. Some "features" are better left behind with the original.

But now I'm gonna do a more thorough check of recent LoG1 mods. If I come up empty-handed, I'm closing the book on Grimrock 1.

EDIT: LOL, someone made a "casual gamer dungeon" for Grimrock:

Lost Halls of Drinn

Features:
- 4 levels of puzzles and action
- Thoroughly tested
- No secret buttons, food system, or torches
- There are 15 secrets, but they are all found by solving optional puzzles, not by searching walls for buttons.
- Unlimited illumination from the Everlight Lantern in both torch and spell flavours, or use the Wand of Light if you prefer
- 16 new spells, cast by using wands instead of runes; wands don't run out of charges
- Instantly teleport between healing crystals
- Defeating monsters gives all party members full experience (no more micromanaging damage)
- Lots of new-ish items, monsters, and decorations
- Protection is much more powerful
- A special bonus for Toorum players
- A well-hidden Easter egg
- Soothing, relentlessly blue colour scheme
- Lots of other stuff I didn't mention

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Check complete. I didn't seen any further Grimrock mods that interested me (though I did find that there's a Chaos Strikes Back mod by the same author as "Back to the Dungeon") but I did try out one solely because the author is an Icelander like myself.

"The Elder of Murwynd Woods" is a story-based mod which is usually a turnoff for me, but this one actually managesd to keep my interest through the first couple of areas. An intro (voiced by the author himself, because DAT ICELANDIC ACCENT) sets the scene as just after the events of LoG1 and you play as a ranger who's sent to meet up with another ranger. Once you arrive at his house you find that HE went to investigate a band of adventurers and now both them AND the other ranger have gone missing in some nearby ruins.

I'll give the author credit, he knows how to build suspense. The surface area has no monsters and the first dungeon only has a handful of pests, nothing to worry about. He does seem to love breakable walls though, good thing a longsword is just as effective as a sledgehammer in bringing them down.

There are times when this reminds me of a Thief FM rather than a Grimrock mod, as you quickly find evidence that something horrible was locked away down in that dungeon. Messages can be found in scroll form, but the author falls prey to the "audiolog syndrome" in his writing of these notes. (You DO NOT end someone's last written words on "...oh no, he's coming".)

My playthrough came to an end when I entered a small village and one of the houses was locked. In another house I found a key and decided to try it on the locked door. The game THREW the key THROUGH the locked door.

Overall...there is nothing of interest or note here except hope for the future. The author was a beta tester for LoG2 and he claims that making this mod was a "learning experience". I hope to see something better from him in LoG2...including better writing skills.

But as for me, unless something spectacularly odd happens, I'm closing the book on LoG1.

 

[Jack Dandy]

Wondering, have you checked out this one :

http://www.grimrock.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6453

?
It's a pretty big, non-linear dungeon made in collaboration by a bunch of people. I really enjoyed it. They even modded in a notebook you can write stuff down in.

 

[Lunac]

First one was all hype. Got bored pretty quick of the identical textures level after level. Even DOS era dungeon crawlers had more environment variety. And I am hearing all the same things now. Nut gunna git me agin!


...
..
.

 

[Jack Dandy]

"Samey level textures" was a valid complaint for Grimrock 1, don't remember people denying that.

2 has far greater variety, though. And you're constantly moving between areas, so you don't have to wait a long time before seeing them. Also, the fact there are multiple height levels for the same "level" in dungeons makes for some more interesting visuals, and puzzles too.

http://imgur.com/lBPvKTd

 

[Unkillable Cat]

What Jack Dandy said, LoG2 supports up to 8 (16?) layers of elevation within a level.

I'll give the Round Robin thing a try at least, I remember one such for Thief 2 and it was hilarious and bizarre.

 

[LESS T_T]

Hello all! The blog has been silent for sometime but do not fear, we have been hard at work. The long overdue iPad version of Grimrock 1 is finally nearing completion and it has entered the closed beta testing stage. This means that the game is playable from start to finish and all features have been implemented. Juha Pinola, the man responsible for the conversion, is currently busy fixing the remaining bugs, smoothing the hard edges and balancing the game.

To celebrate the beta, we have recorded some footage and screenshots of the game. Enjoy!

http://www.grimrock.net/2015/02/09/ipad-first-look-and-other-news/

 

[tarasis]

Will be interesting o see how it plays on the iPad.