With a bit of patience, I’ve finally managed to complete the new review of GRUNND, which – please note – is not the sound my stomach makes at noon, but the most recent (and only) title for PC (both Windows, Linux, and nothing less than Mac OS!) and for Nintendo Switch developed and published by Sektahouse. GRUNND has officially been released at the end of January, but a bit due to laziness, a bit because of more pressing commitments (such as having to take the machine to the workshop twice in a week – and walk home – to fix a problem with the oil pump and filter, all costing a lovely 700 pippi…) I wasn’t able to publish this article in tandem.
From Sektahouse, we were only able to find the GRUNND website and a LinkedIn profile of a man named Olafs Osh, allegedly the director, developer, and… cleaning staff member at Sektahouse, so we can’t say much, except that it’s a Lettonian and genuinely very indie project.
Noir in the DNA
GRUNND is a platform packaged in watercolour brushstrokes, dark hues and Lynchian atmospheres. The artwork seems genuinely hand-drawn and scanned, and what GRUNND promises, both visually and sonically, it delivers superbly, giving the player a pervasive sense of anxiety for all the 5-6 hours of playtime of the adventure. The characters you encounter on your (short) journey seem to have emerged from a nightmare and give the impression that behind them lies a sufficiently manic studio aiming for the most unsettling possible presentation. At times, GRUNND reminded me of my role-playing sessions at Kult, a long time ago.
The verdict is… Noir
To be fair, kudos to the team for wanting to bring the title to Mac OS and Linux, but the Windows version I played in early February was severely disorienting: the areas where interaction was possible were placed far from characters or locations that warranted such interaction, in spots on screen practically at random. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate choice (I fear not), but that alone made my experience truly unpleasant. Regardless of whether it’s available on Steam or the official site, one can read that the soundtrack is very beautiful, but playing it with headphones was simply impossible due to the blasting, ear-shattering bass as a sound effect for every click needed to move from one point to another in the environments.
Maybe I’m part of the problem, but as soon as the game’s intro ends, I always save. Esc. Nothing. Tab. Nothing. F1… Nothing. I discover how to open the main menu half an hour into the game and that’s all because I was fiddling to fix the resolution. Right, because on my monitor, there was no way to make GRUNND fill the whole screen and screen tearing was insane, despite my monitor having GSync enabled.
Speaking of gameplay, I even got the impression that between one scene and the next there should have been some video, but I never got the pleasure of enjoying it, since I was catapulted from one situation to another (I’m not spoiling anything) without any apparent explanation. Bug or choice? I don’t know, but honestly, I was left perplexed (and not in a good way).
Fair enough, the fact that the entire adventure has been dubbed for all the dialogue and perhaps for this reason the price of twelve euros and a half is justified, but even the dialogue sounded like it was written badly. Maybe the Latvian-to-English translation is to blame? To the future, the hard verdict!
Conclusions
I hope (and more than myself, I hope for Sektahouse) that players who have bought GRUNND were not forced to face the disaster I encountered while reviewing it… Despite the fact that there may be people out there with the proverbial “good mouth”, an update is certainly due, at least one that improves relations with the fanbase of people like myself, genuinely disappointed by the final product.
The various marketing praises: “choices that influence the story”, “scary environments” and “dialogues 100% voice-acted” really don’t do justice to what – and I say this with regret – personally seemed to me far from being a 1.0 release.
I refuse, therefore, to give a rating, but at the same time I have neither the desire nor, overall, the time to wait for an improvement.
About the Author
