This is the 16th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I cannot recommend this game, while it does have some basic gameplay elements introduced for an open-world survival game, it doesn’t quite cross the threshold into justifying a price-point for a game that’s unfinished and no longer in development according to the developer’s post from August ‘19.
In Grimtale Island, you play as a nameless, faceless character on one of two islands - one named Starter Island and the other named Grimtale Island. I started off on the Starter Island to learn the core gameplay mechanics then moved onto Grimtale since that’s the title island. Once you’ve chosen your island, you’ll be spawned at a predetermined spawn location to start out your new life.

Since this is an open-world survival game, you’ll need to begin collecting materials to craft workspaces to progress through the tech tree. However, instead of punching trees and rocks to get resources, you’ll respectfully have to pick loose articles up off the ground, only getting the ability to farm rocks and trees with the appropriate tools later on. In addition to rock and wood you can expect to pick up other materials such as fiber and metal. There are some consumables, like food, found in bananas and apples; medicine, like med kits and rad pills; and ammunition, handgun magazines and single-rifle bullets.

Around the island there are three other lifeforms - bunnies and deer, which you can hunt and harvest for meat and fiber, and zombies - the only enemy that threatens your existence aside from the elements. In addition to zombies, you have to try to avoid the cold as well as keep yourself hydrated and fed using items you find around the island. If you explore enough, you may also find vehicles like LUVs, tanks that don’t fire ammo, and helicopters. Oddly enough, these vehicles are incapable of damaging wildlife and zombies -- you just bounce right off.

Lastly, there are several points of interest around Grimtale Island. There’s villages, small and large military outposts, a quarry, a destroyed city, and many other small locations that are lootable. There’s occasionally a robotic trader that you can find who will take rocks and wood only in exchange for money, which you can use to buy ammo, weapon parts, and medicines. One thing you won’t find on this island are tools or weapons, those are only obtainable through crafting.

Well, that’s about everything foundational to the game, so let’s move onto what I did like about Grimtale Island.
The thing that I had liked most about Grimtale Island is the graphics -- regardless of whether or not they’re handcrafted or purchased assets. The environmental assets look great and nothing in the game reads like it’s a mish-mash of asset packs.

But unfortunately that’s about all I could enjoy, so let’s move into the ungood.
So I typically start with smaller nuances and build up to what I think is the worst - so to start, I found the UI to be highly underdeveloped. It doesn’t convey limitations well and is pure text and numbers, which means you can’t visualize your inventory in any capacity. This also means that you can’t store multiple weapons or tools, with the latter being a real pain since your axe breaks after cutting down five trees or so. This led to me building a good dozen or so workbenches around the world just so I’d always have one with me.

Another item that chips away at the enjoyment is that there doesn’t seem to be any procedural generation, randomization, or regeneration. Now, my sample-size testing is limited to three plays, but I found the same items in the same locations in the same quantities. This isn’t the worst thing, but this means your experience will be the same every single time. This leads me to believe that loose materials have been put down by hand, which means you can only find rocks and wood near Points of Interest, which can test your patience if you have no tools to farm wood or rock and are in dire need.

Speaking of Points of Interest, we can segway into my third point which is the amount of underdeveloped Points of Interest. There’s several, but to call specific attention to three - the quarry, the military base, and the destroyed city -- these all are heavily lacking in lootable items, mobs, or decorative furniture. The quarry has no farmable rocks, which seems kinda off, the military base only really contains the helicopter yet spans like a couple hundred-thousand square feet, and the destroyed city, while looking busy and intimidating on the outside, has a dozen or so zombies and maybe two dozen items that are lootable out of the 20-odd something buildings. This is likely due to the development timeline, as these three locations are really far away from the spawn, but it doesn’t take much to get there. While the closer locations are a little more fulfilling, this is also where I learned that you cannot interact with world-generated doors at all -- and with some doors kinda open this leads to some interesting AI interaction.

The AI in this game is pretty basic - if a zombie sees you, it almost seems like they’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth. I’ve come across a conga line of zombies that likely followed me from one village and got stuck on terrain at some point and couldn’t break away, even though I hadn’t seen them for a half an hour. I’ve had some zombies follow me a good thousand feet or so away when I definitely broke line of sight. The zombies are also very good at crowding around doors, but are without the ability of coming in if there are multiple coming in at an angle. If multiple zombies crowd around the door and you have no weapons and no means to make an axe, you’ll just have to die or restart your game. As an honorable mention, deer don’t run away when you shoot them. They just accept their death.

I try to keep it to six points, so to the short of my last point -- the game just isn’t finished. I don’t consider Grimtale Island to be in a finished state where it’s really enjoyable more-so than it being a memory of a passionate and hopeful developer that had an unfortunate hand dealt to them that paused development. If you haven’t read through the updates, the developer has unfortunately declared that Grimtale will no longer be able to be developed. This means that this state that it’s in right now is its final state. There are some questions that arise from curiosity -- the developer posted the end of development news post in August of 2019 laying claim that it will end Early Access and be a free game. However, Early Access ended on November 27th and the game currently costs 99 cents, and has for at least a whole year, save for sales which kicked it down to 89 cents, which happened twice in the last few months. While I can’t answer these questions, I think they’re important to consider if you’re thinking about purchasing this game.

edit: mfw the developer announces it's going back into development the day after i post this review: ʘ ͜ʖ ʘ

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here: https://youtu.be/LEDIbcYBBrE

This dev got heart, i can already see this game becomming awesome )))

The game is making quick progress and the developper is planning tons of stuff.

If you like survival games come support this one !! you can speak to the developper and add him and give him feedback, be a part of the process.

The game features very easy interface and game mechanics, welcoming to new survival - ers and beautifull colorfoul graphics with a sense of atmoshpere.

The develloper is expanding every aspect of the game through every week, with constant updates.

Coop is planned and so much more, go read the logs. Come support this game its gonna be worth it !!

The game has a huge potential, i love the artistic design, the strong color palette and the new 3d volumetric cloud system.

I hope 2019 will be a great year for Grimtale, this game deserves all the love it can get. More players need to check out this fantastic indie game.

I would love Michael to add more :

-Cool OST (music)
-Sound effects, wilderness, animals, interactivity with the world.

It's been abandoned. There have been no updates from what I can tell.

I wish there was a neutral recommendation. This game does have potential. It seems good enough and you get your money's worth I suppose. It is relativity easy. My biggest compliant is the lack of wood resources. Is that the point?

Review at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grpfVqUFHaE&t=22s

Initially bought the game when I found out that this game was going to be removed from Steam, that the developer was going to abandon it.

Played it for 1.4 hours, was surprised how great it looked and how smooth everything went but little frustrated when I was building a shelter and had to remove one wall, it didn't selected that wall, it removed all the other walls which I placed before. And to find sticks and stones, for some reason I could only find some in the area where I spawned but nowhere else.
But I actually had a lot of fun doing stuff. But there were no zombies if I can remember correctly, but all what I remember, I should forget, because the updates changed stuff dramatically.

Now I see, the game is updated, I've read what the developer wrote and I must say, I am compelled to play it again.

But according to what I experienced before the updates, I still recommend it. What I will say after I played this game again, well... I will update this review ofcoarse.

UPDATE (2 hours total playtime)

I've seen the update, there are less crafting options, but I think the developer has rebuild the entire game. So I guess in the near future, there will be more. The zombies are quite rediculous, but it's a concept in progress. I thought I picked up more then 10 wooden sticks, but I still just had 3 which became annoying because there was nothing left on the island anymore. I miss the axe, so I could get a more steady income of stone and wood.

And after getting a huge diarreah from my banana diet, I had to stop and got admitted in a hospital... :D

Brainstorm:
No obvious way to save. [UPDATE: This has been fixed with the latest update.]
Food and drink levels not visible when in inventory to choose food or water.
Stamina levels not visible.
Credits button is clickable, but doesn’t take you anywhere.
Beautiful colors and music.
The zombies were a nice surprise.
The wolves are extremely glitchy and get stuck often. The island is ‘small’, which was nice, given ‘small island’ is the only choosable option at the time of this review.
The bunnies are cute as hell.

Review:
It’s quite simple; build a wall in front of a house with a fence and you’re safe. I searched the entire island, but I didn’t find any weapons and punching wasn’t obviously done, either. The controls that pop up, don’t stay long enough and need to be colored more obviously.
Don’t swim for too long, as the beautiful music and ambiance will surely put you to sleep. In regards to the water, there didn’t appear to be an oxygen level. Either I didn’t swim underwater long enough, or there isn’t an oxygen level.
The worst part is there doesn’t appear to be any sort of save feature. If there is, I completely missed it.
While playing, I absolutely missed the [shift] for sprinting and [L] for flashlight controls, so it may absolutely be there, but I didn’t see it. This may be a feature coming in future updates. The options are there, but making them more obvious needs to be improved.

In the end, the $3.99 price is more than fair for what you’re getting here. I am not being paid for this review in any way. I did receive this game for free in exchange for my honest review as a curator and content provider. This game has a LOT of potential and its final release will surely be one many will desire. As of now, without obvious controls and an obvious save feature, I give this game 2.5/5 [UPDATE: I now give this game a 3.5/5]. I would’ve given it a 4/5 with a save feature and more obvious controls.

At this time, I can't honestly recommend the game without a save feature.
[UPDATE: Soon after this review, the saving feature was added. Therefore, I have raised my rating and now recommend this game.]

Thank you for reading.

Alright, you need to understand this game is in Beta.
Considering that, I can with no problem recommend the game.
Granted, there's so much missing, the game is entirely empty, BUT the potentioal is soooo great.

I would recommend for anyone to get it now since it's cheap, it will help the developpers AND you won't pay a fortune once it gets fully updated.

I haven't played much (bit more than an hour) and it was enough to go through pretty much the whole game.

I would recommend to the developpers to add a few basic stuff.
- Button to run (Usually ''Shift'')
- Possibility to craft a deposit box (I was full after 10 minutes)
- Possibility to aim with your weapon
- The option to grab the Apples (You can only eat them on the spot)
- The option of looting the Zombies
- Being able to open your inventory with ''Tab'' (And also keep ''I'')
- Being able to repair your weapon (Maybe you can already with the furnace, I didn't try that yet)
It's all I can think of for the moment.

Can't wait to see the new updates, I will play again for sure!

Actually flipping the assets would be effort i guess?
5min of my life i will never get back

I can't believe it took me so long to find this game on steam, and I am sad to see that the developer is moving on, as the game is good and still has so much potential in what it could of been. So decided to buy it anyway, and am glad I did.

So recommending anyway, cause it is good.

While this game is still in the very very early days of developement. I would reccomend buying. the game has a lot of potential and has a very polished look for how early it is.
THe updates are coming thick and fast and the dev listens to his players to either implement new ideas and or fix the bugs discovered.

Keep an eye on this one. I think it will turn out to be a cracker