Grim Realms

Review

What if you and some of your closest friends were allowed to leave the rat race of the daily nine-to-five, and with the whirl of a magic wand, be sent to a new and unexplored world. Would you go to the coast, the mountains or the wide open plains? Everything would be up to you to decide, and you’d have to learn how to survive from day one - you know, like the Survivor reality television show. Not your cup of tea? Well, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you try helping four villagers settle in a promised land - with a twist? What twist, you might ask? The lands will be filled with undead! Welcome to Grim Realms.

Grim Realms is a colony survival base-building strategy game developed and self-published by Edym Pixels on the 16^th of March 2024 on the Steam platform.

After launching the game for the first time, you’ll create a new world. Next, you’ll select how many races live in that world; the generic value is seven races out of ten, but you can increase or decrease them as you like. Then you’ll select the position of your new settlement on the map. The position will determine the difficulty of your playthrough. It’s important that I mention this, because when I chose the position of my settlement, I unwittingly made things difficult for myself, so suggest that you do things differently.

I selected a location where events would be spread out every one and a half days, and that’s where I went wrong. Events can be new visitors or tradespeople finding your wonderful place, which is great. But it can also be an attack from the undead or other factions. I reckon that to learn the game, it’s better to start a settlement where events are spread further apart so you have time to develop your colony and expand your resources and weapons. Having said that, it’s a bit of a catch-22, as having fewer events means fewer visitors.  Fewer visitors means fewer offers to join your group, which can be detrimental to the growth of the colony. 

Wherever you establish your settlement, choose your clan name and shield, and then the game will begin. It’s presented as a side-scroller genre, and your four characters will be accompanied by two caravans full of goodies. The Landscape will be a bit uneven - some areas will have trees, rocks and other natural elements, such as trunks from fallen trees – while other areas will be flat where you can build your house and start farming. The underground is vast, but it will all be blacked out because it hasn't been explored yet. Each of your four characters will be assigned a main skill: building, mining, farming or researching. You can assign your characters specific jobs during the day or create new jobs without dedicating them to a specific individual, in which case the jobs will be allocated one by one to the next free character. These jobs will develop new skills for your characters. 

Very quickly, you’ll go underground, where you'll find important minerals for upgrading your building and weapons. You might also find rats, spider nests, chests with goodies, tombs, statues and even stone tablets with engravings to decipher. By deciphering the engravings, you might get a hint about where to dig next to find potential new goodies.  But sometimes it will open a door that the undead can come through and kill all of your characters if they are not well-equipped.

The research element in this game is relatively small as it is based on medieval times, but everything makes sense. If you have a few people who are good at researching and a couple of research tables within your house, you'll go through the research tree in no time, assuming that you have enough people in your clan and two members constantly researching.

In my latest attempt, I managed to get eight people in my group, and I was ready to send three of them with a caravan to another location. Unfortunately, the next event was a massive onslaught from the undead, and I lost four poor souls. Instead of focusing on amour and weapons for my characters, I had been more interested in creating food and goodies for my caravan. Big oversight.

The more I play this game, the more I like it, as I keep discovering new things. The developer did a great job.

The pixel artwork is excellent, the music is fun, and the game runs pretty well. I haven't experienced any crashes. Yes, there are bugs here and there, but overall, it's pretty good. In terms of controls, this genre of game can only be played with the mouse and keyboard.

Grim Realms is a good colony survival game.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Grim Realms Steam Store Page