Grimoire Groves

What a delightful time Grimoire Groves is. Full disclosure: I had backed the game on Kickstarter, as its first demo had fully put its hooks in me and refused to let go. But there are two sides to my love for the demo: I might look at the game more favourably, or I might just be more critical of its shortcomings. As I always do when reviewing a game, I try to keep an objective view of what I played, but I can’t deny my happiness at finding the full game to be even better than the demo.

The first thing you’ll notice is just how colourful Grimoire Groves is. The cool thing about that is that it’s not limited to the actual use of colours in its visuals. Every character you meet, even the one you play as, Primrose, is so full of personality. Primrose is on track to become a witch: she arrives at the titular groves to learn all she needs to know from her Aunt Lavender. And boy is she excited! Her dialogue really sounds like an excitable young person: ready to conquer everything in her path, but deeply emotional and empathetic to things going on around her.

When she arrives at her aunt’s garden at the start of the game, she finds the place in disarray. All of the plants are gone, with nothing but weeds in their place. So the first step on the path to becoming a witch turns out to be… fixing the garden. You do this by going out to the forest, feeding adorable plant creatures some of your magic, and collecting their seeds and plants to bring back home. These adventures in the woods are rather peaceful. Even though the gameplay is reminiscent of a roguelike dungeon crawler like Hades, there is no combat. It’s all about dodging plants who get a little too clingy and steal some of your energy and feeding them the magic they need. Even if you are drained of all your energy, you don’t die; you just fall asleep and wake up back at the garden. I still struggled with this for some reason, even though the game isn’t that difficult, but luckily for me, there is a relaxed mode setting that can be toggled on at any given moment.

During your hikes in the forest, you’ll also encounter other creatures. These can range from elemental spirits who have apparently fallen out with each other to a tavern keeper who has lost his entire tavern. There are different ways to interact with all of these creatures: some will ask you to create food or drinks with them, which leads to creative minigames, while for others you’ll have to collect items in order to advance their stories. There’s just about enough variety in everything on offer here to keep things interesting. Most of what you find in the forests can also be used to upgrade your home and your garden, but don’t spend it all on these upgrades: whenever you enter the forest, you can also have your ingredients be turned into compost, which you’ll need for some of the side quests you’ll encounter.

Herein lies something that might bother some of you. Most of the gameplay consists of collecting different things, and especially when it comes to the garden upgrades, this can become a little tedious. The grind is real in this one, and while I don’t really mind that at all, it feels worth mentioning. Especially at the beginning of the game, when there is barely any variety in the plant creatures you encounter, it might tiptoe a bit too close to the edge of boring. Then again, with runs within the forests being on the shorter side, the game does manage to keep things fresh enough. Meeting the different characters is engaging, even if you’re not always able to comply with their wishes. The story of the elemental spirits is intriguing without being too difficult to follow, and you can tell that the developers clearly wanted this game to be playable for people of all ages, and I think they’ve really succeeded with that.

Once you’ve unlocked all the different elements and have managed to expand your library of spells enough, the game really feels like you can customise it completely to your own wishes. There’s variety in how to handle each different plant creature, especially once you have to be careful which magic you feed them, and the game keeps adding elements throughout your entire gameplay so as to never become too stale.

This could easily become one of those hybrid games like Cult of the Lamb that manage to find a huge fan base within the cosy community. There’s a little bit of farming, some decorating, some ‘combat’ while collecting all of your ingredients, and plenty of warmth and colour to be found throughout. I especially love how the magic you use is bound to the four elements of nature, keeping something that could become a bit mystical very grounded in our planet. Man, I wish I could become a witch if this is what it takes. Meet wonderful people and creatures, tend to a beautiful garden, and spread magic among the plant creatures. What a life that would be!