izigame.me

I'd never even heard of GRIME until I chanced upon it while browsing the Steam winter sale, but it has quickly become one of my best games of the year. It's in the crowded genre of 2D metroidvanias with Dark Souls-like combat, but rises above its peers.
The game's most striking feature, and the thing that first made me pause my Steam scrolling, is its visual aesthetic. Unlike many other Souls clones, GRIME manages to recreate the underlying horror and unease of Dark Souls without copying its rotting medieval aesthetic. Instead, GRIME chooses to creep the player out with uncanny valley and body horror. Everything in the game lies somewhere in the triangle of carved stone, wild vegetation, and too many human body parts in all the wrong places. It's gross and unnerving in the best possible way.
On the other hand, GRIME's story is very obviously trying to copy the vibe of Souls games. It covers the main points of a world malformed and decaying, and you the protagonist attempting to shake things up by killing a bunch of grotesque monsters and gods. Overall, the worldbuilding is decent, but not as good as the Souls games. However, something about seeing misshapen rock creatures willing to be cut, carved and crushed to attain perfect human body proportions speaks to body confidence and dysmorphia issues that are haunting at an unconscious and primal level.
However, it is the game's combat that is its best feature. It's standard Souls stamina-based combat, but stamina costs and regeneration speeds are much more brutal than Dark Souls. Dodges have good i-frames, but you won't have enough stamina to dodge everything while attacking. What you do have is a parry that costs no stamina, does not interrupt your stamina generation, and will become the key component in the game's combat system. Enemy health bars in this game are divided into red and grey segments. If you parry an enemy while their health is grey, it becomes a Repel and they get interrupted for a short time. But if you parry while their health is red, it becomes an Absorb, which is much more powerful. By Absorbing an enemy, you immediately deplete that entire segment of their health bar, and four successful Absorbs will give you a heal, this game's version of an Estus Flask. Essentially, skilled parrying functions as defense, offense, healing and stamina management all in one.
Later on you get a force pull that you can use on enemies after they use attacks that leave them off-balance, stunning them and leaving them open to attacks. There are also unstoppable attacks that cannot be parried at all and must be dodged. This creates an engaging defensive game of parry/pull/dodge, similar to the deflect/mikiri/jumpkick/dodge system that is found in Sekiro. Combat in this game revolves around switching between attacking and absorbing to deal with grey and red health respectively, all while making sure to choose the correct option between parry, pull and dodge to avoid incoming attacks. I cannot stress this enough: this game will feel awful if you try to dodgeroll through everything the moment you feel like you're in danger, you need to recognise what attacks the enemy is using and respond accordingly.
Another cool combat feature is the game's weapons. Every weapon archetype has a light attack combo that they all share, but each individual weapon has a their own heavy attack with its own unique mechanic. For example, two scythes in the game might have the same attack pattern for the light attack, but one of them has a heavy attack that reaches out and pulls enemies closer to you, while the other has a heavy attack that is a counter slash that deals bonus damage if you get hit during the windup. This means that choosing between weapons of the same type is more meaningful than just seeing which one has the bigger number, and it really encourages you to try many weapons to see their special gimmick instead of just immediately settling on one thing.
The one part of GRIME that is somewhat disappointing is the platforming. It's not bad by any means, but it's a bit stiff and janky, which is a big shame for a platforming metroidvania. Many of the platforming sections require you to keep triggering the ledge-climbing animation, which is slightly too slow for comfort and tends to stop your momentum. One of the major platforming upgrades you get is the ability to dash towards fixed points in the air, which once against pulls you to a location and then kills your momentum. The double jump is also kind of floaty and laggy, kind of like Ness or Lucas in Smash Bros, but it is also slow, so once again you tend to slow down after using it. None of these are deal breakers, but when you traverse through platforming sections that you've gone through before you don't get that feeling like you do in more movement-focused metroidvanias like Ori and Hollow Knight that you can use your knowledge and experience to breeze through the area. I want traversal in a platformer to be fun in and of itself, but in GRIME it ends up being filler content between combat encounters.
Still, GRIME is overall a fantastic game, with an engrossing world and challenging, deep, rewarding combat. Additionally, the devs are still actively patching the game, so we can expect to see problems be addressed and content be added in future. It's definitely worth checking out.