Legend of Grimrock

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Great game. It's basically Etrian Odyssey, which I of course love, but with real time combat. And a ton of puzzles.

First, the combat is actually kind of interesting. You're kind of gimped in how you can do things. You can only have one inventory for 1 of your 4 characters up on the screen. And then the 2 things equipped in the hands of each character. And you have to physically click those items to use them. It makes it kind of frantic.

In addition due to the real-time nature of it and the whole grid-based combat of it, you end up having to move around a whole bunch to basically fake out the enemies. This is called "square dancing" by some which I find to be apt and love.

The game is extremely challenging, again, like Etrian. What's great is while it's extremely challenging you can use the whole "square-dancing" thing to gain a leg up on the enemies. Plus, they have done such a great job with the level design that if you hunt out treasures you actually end up being fairly strong by the end of the game. There's a really nice power-curve as you play the game which I loved.

Now, my biggest gripe with the game are the puzzles. For starters, I'm not a "puzzle guy". Adding insult to injury here is a ton of them are just not that obvious. They do this thing where half the secrets are tied to switches that are hidden in the walls. And are very hard to spot. I mean that's just tedious. You want me to scan every wall looking for a tiny indistinct square? Sorry, dude, but fuck off with that shit. I ended up using a guide for a good half of the game any time I would get stuck because it just got really tedious.

Besides that it was a really fun romp. In some ways better than Etrian (namely the power curve and reasonable challenge that wasn't based on memorizing move patterns and combos).