Indie Game Club Issue 1: Grimm's Hollow

SUPERJUMP's Indie Game Club is a monthly series where YOU can play along! This month, we played Grimm's Hollow, a short and sweet RPG by ghosthunter that you can play for free on Steam. Our mission at Indie Game Club is to drive conversation surrounding interactive art by creating a book club-inspired platform featuring free games by indie publishers that push the boundaries of small team game development.

Coming in April, we will be playing Nightmare Kart, the PSX Bloodborne-inspired karting fan project by LWMedia. We will be giving our thoughts on the game next month, and you can follow along! Get the game on Steam HERE for free and join our comment section to let us know what you think about the old school karting game.

So without further ado, enjoy our team's impressions of our March game club title, Grimm's Hollow.

Alexander B. Joy

The high point of this game for me is definitely the aesthetics. I love the Earthbound and Pokémon influence, and appreciate how both the ghostly purple palette and the protagonist’s name hearken to the spooky funeral town from the Red, Blue, and Yellow versions. Also, my goodness, are those sprites for the baked goods adorable. That said, I’m less interested in the allusive aesthetic choices than in what they achieve. Because when a game is this conversant with the RPGs of yesteryear, the tropes it chooses not to keep become equally as important as those it does.

I couldn’t help but notice that Grimm’s Hollow has no victory theme when you win a battle (a “reaping” in the game’s parlance), and no victory animation of which to speak. The moment a fight ends, the music goes right back to the BGM of the area you’re exploring, and we only see poor Lavender slumped over, gasping for breath after the exhausting struggle; no matter how strong she grows, Lavender’s post-fight posture never changes; battles always tax her. It gives the sense that the task before her is utterly unrelenting. There’s no time to celebrate anything, and it’s back to the business of reaping as soon as a ghost is downed. It creates an aesthetic of exhaustion that perfectly conveys the understated awfulness of Lavender’s limbo state. No wonder reapers want to move on.

Taylor D. Levesque

Grimm’s Hollow is a whole lot of good in one little package that only takes a couple of hours to complete. There is a lot of story packed into that short span of time, and some of that story is even told in the simple animations during gameplay. For example, the way certain NPCs move around at given times, or how our protagonist slumps after every single reaping victory. No celebration, no changes in animations as she grows stronger, just an exhausted slump at the end of an arduous task. The interpretation of whether the difficulty is physical, mental, emotional, or all of the above is left up to the player. Regardless, it adds to the atmosphere and story in a way that is subtle, yet effective. 

The colour purple tends to represent peace, spirituality, intuition, and bravery. It also happens to be the main colour in the game, even down to the character’s name being Lavender. It’s a fitting aesthetic in the game's deep story, which revolves around death, grief, and the bond between two siblings. For the short amount of gameplay offered, Grimm’s Hollow made sure every little detail would count toward the story they were trying to tell – and they succeeded; this is a work of storytelling genius. 

Nathan Kelly

There’s almost nothing to dislike about Grimm’s Hollow. The game hooks players with an adorable visual style and story surrounding a world that is easy to grasp and easily relatable characters. The darkly whimsical setting really grabbed me at first, and I was quite surprised to see that the variation in enemies, gameplay, and dungeons only increased my desire to fight every enemy and see all the nooks and hidden paths the game has tucked away. My only stumble in this game was that the timing prompts sometimes overlapped my other windows, and it was hard to tell if I could dodge or if I had a window prompt that would appear.

What really stuck with me was in the final push to the end, the visuals go monochrome, the music is stripped to the basic sounds, and the fights get trivialized as you maximize the threshold on your stats and skills. The first hour and a half I spent with Grimm’s Hollow was tripping on the power fantasy that it delivers in spades, gaining enough experience to cash out almost every fight and seeing yourself start to defeat any enemy in one well-timed hit pretty consistently. But the new grey aesthetics suddenly changed the mood and it had me wondering if reaping ghosts was the right thing to be doing.

There are two fights right next to each other that really affected me.

The first was an enemy called TRIO with three distinct life bars that must be defeated in order. This enemy is three ghosts that cling together, the larger one protecting the smaller ones. Being forced to defeat them one by one forces you to see the solitude of the final ghost. Were they friends, siblings, maybe just coworkers? Reaping them might send them to the afterlife together, or it might not. 

The second fight is against The Lovers, a conjoined enemy that will attack until you defeat one of the pair. If you reap one of them, the other turns blue and makes no further actions. You reap the second in the hopes that their afterlives intertwine.

The subtle storytelling here was brilliant and had me itching to see the conclusion of the game. Lavender’s story of selflessness and determination is heartfelt and the blunt, relatable prose made each character believable and interesting. A few minor gripes about the combat stop me just short of recommending Grimm's Hollow to everyone, but any person with 2 hours and an interest in indie role-playing games will find entertainment here.