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Grimvalor is a high speed take on the Souls and Metroidvania genres

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Grimvalor
• Developer: Direlight
• Publisher: Direlight
• Switch (previously on iOS, Android)

From the Souls-esque mechanical trappings to the Metroidvania style maps, Grimvalor screams familiar. But what it doesn’t have in originality it makes up in an incredible moment to moment action. It streamlines the layouts and mechanics of its inspirations for portable play, then adds on top of it high speed movement that allows you to move fluidly through both stages and enemy hordes. 

Combat is a simple rhythm of holding down the attack, dodging with the correct timing, then throwing in more powerful attacks to break through enemy posture and give you an opening to inflict even more damage. It lacks the technicality and complex builds of its contemporaries, but replaces it with something more fluid and immediate. 

Grimvalor isn’t about agonizing about every stat upgrade or tensing up about losing experience. It’s about quickly depopulating dungeons and dragging out every item of loot then cashing it in for the next cool ability. It appeals to that part of me that loves to clear out maps, making sure every room in an area gives up its secrets. To that point it even tells you exactly how many treasures are left in an area, and gives you the full completion percentage of every section of the map during loading screens. 

Rather than one massive sprawling map, Grimvalor’s is carved into stages, which are then carved into smaller blocks. It makes it easier to keep the ways that each area connects in mind, and keep the pace brisk whenever you need to return to other areas. Again, it trades the traditional strengths of the genre’s structure for something more immediate, and it pays off. 

Maybe in a slower paced game the simplicity of its map design and straightforward nature of its combat would be tiring, but Grimvalor never gives you time to get bored of it. There’s always a new enemy type, a new boss, or a new ability around the corner, opening up the map and changing your approach to combat in slight ways to keep it fresh throughout. None of these fundamentally change your approach–you’ll never find yourself suddenly having to play steady and carefully–but the do change the beats and rhythms of the game. 

Grimvalor is closer to the flow of a good beat-em-up than its contemporaries in the Metroidvania genre. Rather than change how you operate within the world through new abilities, it starts you with an interesting moveset, then forces you to change up your rhythms by introducing new threats into the world. The best illustration of this is in its Hunters–a set of powerful enemies that periodically appear while you explore the world, with little warning. Often they’ll appear at inopportune times, forcing you to deal with other threats on top of their high damage attacks that leave little room for error. 

It’s small touches like that help give Grimvalor an identity of its own. You’ve seen plenty of what it’s offered before, but it does it well, and the moment to moment feeling is exceptional. Grimvalor hits plenty of familiar notes, but it plays them back at a brisk tempo, full of infectious energy.