FULL REVIEW: Grim Quest

[Two Clicks]

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IN A WORD: WORTHWHILE

IN A NUTSHELL:

WHAT TO EXPECT:

Indie made. Mobile port. Dark, medieval, horror based fantasy theme. Rogue-lite format. Grid-based dungeon crawler. Ability and inventory-based character customisation. Clicker styled turn-based tactical combat. Psychological horror themes and enemies. 2D Minimalist graphics. Tablet styled GUI. Retro gothic style and aesthetic. Single-player only

ACHIEVEMENTS:	None
STEAM SUPPORTS:	Cloud Saves
BUGS, ISSUES & STABILITY	Though plenty of bugs and issues have been reported on discord, I only experienced one crash during my playthroughs
STATUS:	Fully released. Currently being supported
FOR WHOM:	Fans of dungeon crawlers. Those with an affinity to mobile styled GUIs and grindy gameplay. Supports software for partially sighted assistance
VALUE FOR MONEY:	With lots of content, room for multiple playthroughs its more than worth the full-price. Built for extended play

More info below....

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2797729404

CONTENT:

Grim Quest (GQ) is a mobile port with a focus on dungeon crawling and roleplay elements. Encased within abstracted features, it is set in a medieval world infested by a dark horror. It possesses a rogue-lite format, character customisation, inventory management, turn-based tactical combat and strategic management in the form of sieges, extended play and customisation settings.

THE GAME WORLD

THE SETTING: Play in a medieval fantasy themed world all but conquered by a malevolent force called The Dark.
THE CITY: The character is based in an abstracted city replete with numerous facilities to prepare the player for their next expedition into monster filled dungeons. Each with their own screen.
FACILITIES: While in the city visit the tavern to prepare for the next expedition or to stash unwanted equipment. Buy and sell inventory at the trader. Learn abilities at the guild house and mystic emporium. Visit the blacksmith to upgrade basic weapons and armour. Craft at the boiling cauldron. Marshall the cities defenders manpower and morale. Choose strategic disciplines from the governing council. Manage bounties and collect daily wages for every completed dungeon level.
CITY SIEGES: Periodically on your return from a dungeon the enemies of the Dark will send waves of fighters to try to break the city. Each wave must be faced with your choice of mercenary company with the option of sending a scouting party or using two artillery pieces to assist your efforts.
WORLD MAP: When ready leave for the next dungeon, go to the work map and choose which one to embark into.

CHARACTER CUSTOMISATION

BACKGROUND: Customise character by choosing one of 27x backgrounds to augment a particular stat, depending on a preferred playstyle.
PET COMPANION: Choose a pet from a choice of 16 types that provide additional abilities and level in potency every fifth level. They can be switched mid-game at a cost of gold.
TIERED ROLEPLAYING: Every five levels choose to learn, 1x or 2x abilities from 25x spells and 25x skills, by purchasing them with gold. Upgrade any up to a max of 5x or 6x times, through the expenditure of gold.
PRIMARY STATS: Augment a range of stats according to a desired build through levelling, choosing certain skills and equipping certain inventory items. These include: Health, Armour, Sanity, Evasion, Damage, Critical Strike, Resolve, Spell Damage and Resistance.
SECONDARY STATS: Additional stats will provide strengths of weaknesses to the type of character being built. These include: Supplies, Event Chance, Healing, Pierce Armour, Extra Damage vs Specific Races and cooldown rate. These are gained on the same principles as primary stats.
SPELLS & SKILLS: As well as the active abilities there are passives which boost the player with needing to be used. A number of slots only allow for certain amount of these to be learned at any one time. These increase every five levels. In addition they can only be upgraded to a limit and only when certain experience levels have been reached. A few Council Upgrades allow the number of spells and their level to be increased. Gold is required learn or upgrade these.
BUILD TYPES: Choose whatever build type suits your playstyle from several viable ones including: Glass Cannon, Tank, Healer or AoE damage dealer. Even decide specialise these with more than one possible option.
RESPEC SKILLS & SPELLS: Remove unwanted or unneeded spells and skills once the appropriate facility (outside the city) has been unlocked.

DUNGEON CRAWLING

OBJECTIVES: Carry out expeditions of one dungeon level per day and return to the city for your pay. Encounter increasingly dangerous foes the further down your character goes.
GRID-BASED DUNGEONS: Move through a configurable grid-based representation of a dungeon with at least 5x5 tiles. Use supplies as you move across the dungeon to find the exit or chicken out and return through the entrance.
ENCOUNTERS: Encounter opponents or events. Fight enemies. Find gold. Gain and lose sanity. Find gold and inventory items. Trigger traps. Get healed, buffed or lose health. Some events will even permanently raise some stats. THere are even traders that offer some of the rarest items in the game located with the tiles of the dungeon.
TURN-BASED TACTICAL COMBAT: Use spells, skill-based attacks and inventory items to fight 1vs3 enemies in turn-based combats.
EXPERIENCE: Gain XP to level-up your character and gain points in inherent stats and open up additional skill and spell slots every five levels.
CURRENCY: Grind for gold. A lot will be needed as it is used for everything from maintaining city defenders, learning skills and spells, buying new inventory or preparing for an expedition.
SANITY: Manage your character's sanity or suffer its effects with psyche generated enemies or affecting your ability to see stats on screen during combat.
BOUNTIES: Obtain up to six bounties that reward the player with gold on their completion. Recover an item, kill a certain number of an enemy type, explore one level from a particular dungeon or kill or enemies on a level of a particular dungeon.
AMBUSHES: Encounter enemy ambushes when retracing your steps on any previously revealed dungeon tile.

INVENTORY

WEAPONS: Acquire and equip a range of weapons, including firearms that augment the damage stat. Some imbue additional characteristics such as the ability to deliver additional racial damage. Others include the great chance of causing a critical hit, increasing the ability to evade damage, or cause great spell damage. A few also increase the chance of piercing armour and inflicting all their damage.
ARMOUR: Similarly several types of armour can be equipped to primarily augment the armour or health stats. In addition some can imbue the same characteristics as weapons. While others can also lower cooldowns, increase max. sanity, spell resistance,
ACCESSORIES: Additional items can be equipped in order to augment certain stats even more.
As well as bonuses given for weapons and armour specific spell damage, increased trader prices, better healing, less chance to get ambushed, chance to restore sanity, health recovery or reduced chance of enemy critical strikes can be gained.
SUPPILES: Maintain enough supplies to complete the expedition across a dungeon level but purchasing them from the tavern. Augment these with consumables from the traders or those found while scouring a dungeon.
CONSUMABLES: As well as some being ingredients for crafting numerous items can be consumed to provide healing, restore sanity, temporarily buff damage, evasion, critical hits and armour. Some can even increase max. health, be used as materials at the blacksmith and reduce or banish dark manifestations. There are even a selection of bombs to with area of effect capabilities, instant travel to the city, map reveal, that instantly generate gold or XP or be used for character revival especially useful when permadeath is active. Many are also the target of bounties.

TURN-BASED COMBAT

Somewhat tactical turn-based combat that begins when enemies are encountered. Up to 1vs3 combatants. Can be retreated from if the evasion stat is high enough.
ENEMIES: Discover and battle a large range of enemy species and classes for each. Each with its own preferred attack style using spells and abilities that mirrors the player's character.
PSYCHE CREATED FOES: Fight enemies created from the character's own psyche as their sanity begins to fail, the long they are outside the city's outskirts.
TACTICAL ACTIONS: Perform actions determined by the Spells and skills chosen and items available in the inventory. Each one with a limited number of uses and a cooldown mechanic to limit spamming. With the option to defend or retreat from combat making up the rest.
RETREATING: Players can evade confrontation but there is a risk that it may fail.
PERMADEATH: If a player dies without permadeath they are returned to the city and a day is incremented in the game's calendar. They receive no daily wage. Otherwise they must restart.
ABILITY COOLDOWNS: Spells, skills and inventory use cooldown mechanisms to limit any spammed use.

SUPPORTING FEATURES

SIEGES: Three companies of mercenaries must be managed to defend the city from enemies of The Dark. Attacking in waves the player can send out a scouting party or use artillery to help them. While replacing casualties and maintaining morale between assaults. If the last defender falls in permadeath, it is the end of the game.
EXTENDED GAMEPLAY: Once the main quests have been completed, additional quests and dungeons can be attempted.
GAMEPLAY PREFERENCES: Customise the game to your preference with 4x difficulty options, the choice of permadeath, dungeon size and 3x options for other adjustable settings such as: dungeon size, event frequency and XP requirements for level progression.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2797727355

TOP TAKEAWAYS:

The key takeaways were:

THE GOOD:	+ Surprisingly deep gameplay due to a well-balanced and complimentary set of mechanics. + Impressive range of viable [& unviable] character builds allows for fun experimentation. + Changing pet companion and respecing spells and abilities helps overcome mistakes. + Lots of different enemies: At least 9x racial types and 5x classes for each type. + Great use of game and combat settings to customise the preferred experience. + Good production values as displayed by its very polished appearance. + Ambience and aesthetic captures its setting and theme really well.
THE BAD:	- Its abstract representation not be immersive or appealing to PC gamers. - Mistakes in character building can cause combat to be too difficult that it should be. - Ambushes on revisited dungeon tiles are unbalanced and overwhelming during - There is a real need to grind gold as it is need for everything except crafting. - Spells can only be cast while in combat, not while exploring the dungeon. - The dice game in the tavern is not worth playing. With odds of 1:6 for a minimal return - Exchanging items with full inventory and stash can be problematic.
AND THE REST:	* Tablet/mobile styled GUI is immaculate but missing a few things. Made to help gamers with partial vision. * Basic but informative tutorial. * Moody, atmospheric soundtrack is an apt addition but some elements could be pre-made assets. * Combat can be fun when trying out new builds but begin to feel formulaic once the "perfect" build is created. * Sieges are fine but a fairly shallow affair. Could have done with a greater depth of strategy. * Blacksmith screen lacks access to the player's stash. Functionality that the Crafting screen already has. * Crafting screen could do with showing which recipes have the necessary ingredients available.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2797727022

FINDINGS:

This section provides an analysis of my time playing the game:

MY EXPERIENCE

Captures the crawler element really well given its abstracted style. Turn-based tactical combat varies on the character build in use. Its fun comes from learning the game but is not so tactical once a viable pattern of tactical actions is established. The frequency of ambushes makes it frustrating. Switching to a meta-build allowed me to get past the curve, eventually causing gameplay to become formulaic.

Ironically the greater fun being in the trial and error of attempting to create a build without understanding the underlying model. The grinding for gold was real and iterated a process of upgrading in stages. Mainly because there is only one character to tinker with. No party. All the city facilities were a perfect foil for preparing for the next expedition. Apart from the dice game used for gambling. That seemed to have been put in as an after-thought. The siege element felt a fairly light. I enjoyed it but others may find it a distraction not worth the effort.

IMMERSION	QUALITY
Its retro gothic aesthetic was a definite boon in immersing the player in what is a simple abstracted game. A mix of soulful and vibrant music made for a fair accompaniment to gameplay. Some if not all of the music and sound-effects could be paid assets. I'm sure I've heard them in similar game.	For a mobile port with an obvious tablet style GUI production values were very good. Producing a very polished final article. The lack of issues reported to the dev have either been dealt with, were not on PC or simply did not occur for me. The one crash happened after an update probably caused by my AV. I was able to load the game and continue.
BALANCE & DIFFICULTY	REPLAYABILITY & LONGEVITY
GQ is not a complex game. Its difficulty centres around character building. Get this wrong and the game will be harder that it should be. Find a meta-build character and only certain encounters remain challenging. Eventually the frequency of ambushes proves annoying rather than difficult. The forced limit to spells, skills, blacksmith and council upgrades works very well. Balancing the character as they make their way through the main quest. With a change to combat coming its tactical nature is sure to change. In certain respects it could have done with the ability to respec earlier on to allow players to trial and learn sooner.	Despite being story-driven the game has a lot to make it replayable. The dungeon levels are dynamic in content. Combat and events both. Only the locations of main quests objectives are fixed. Still there is a whole 4x more dungeons of the same content created purely for extended play. Multiple viable character builds and ancillary build options ensure that the game can be replayed at least one if not more. Allowing players to try different play style. While the range of gameplay and combat settings ensures players can tailor their experience to suit their preferences. If there is a bottom level to each dungeon I do not know of it.

MISCELLANEOUS

A full game took15-20 hours to complete with the settings at: more events, larger dungeons and quicker levelling.

VERDICT:

Grim Quest is very polished, mobile influenced dungeon crawler with abstracted, if at times grindy gameplay that swings from enjoyable to formulaic. Its a WORTHWHILE experience.

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