Grimshade - Released

Myrthos

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Grimshade from the Russian developer TaleRock, has been released today on Steam.



Having exceeded its 100K US$ Kickstarter goal in June 2018 for Grimshade, fledgeling Russia developer Talerock, a team of 21 gaming specialists, have since been busy developing their JRPG debut title, set in the fantastic fantasy world of Ree'Fah, which will offer RPG gamers a slice of magical immersion.

MacOS version and GoG release are coming in near future. Nintendo Switch launch is planned at the end of 2019.Grimshade is a party-based role-playing game inspired by JRPG of the 90s, featuring a tactical turn-based combat system and a grim story of war and personal choices.

Lead the group of the motley adventurers on a journey through the world of Ree'Fah. Explore a diverse of stunning locations and varied people and reveal plot-related secrets. There are many characters to meet and places to wander, all created with hand-drawn artwork that makes the land feel lived in.
But remember, beauty is deceptive - danger lurks everywhere. Numerous monsters in Grimshade has been carefully crafted to impulse players, forcing them to learn their attack styles and build a plan on how to counter them. Test your skills in challenging turn-based battles, adjusting your combat tactics and optimal team combinations for each foe you met on the way.
Story

Grimshade tells you the story of the company of heroes, by a twist of fate involved in the cycle of events unfolding in the world of Ree'fah. Numerous dreadful monsters infested the forest around the city of Brann, and high walls could no longer protect residents from the attacks. The menacing army of the neighbouring kingdom suddenly landed on the outskirts of the city, wreaking havoc. There is no hope for salvation - the strength of the defenders is running low, but the King and his loyal Champions had vanished.

Series of sudden events and odd coincidences force people to act. Get acquainted with each of the heroes and unite them - entirely different, sometimes bizarre and frightening, with their motives, but one purpose for all - to find out the real causes of what happened to them.

Features


  • Seven memorable characters, including Kiba, the dark child, Charlie, the talking sniper badger, Alister, the brave guy with an Ether gauntlet, and Ruby, the princess of the thieves. Each of them has their role (sometimes more than one) on the battlefield and their own mission on a big journey.

  • Character development system is based on equipment: each piece of armour, weapon or accessory gives a unique skill to a particular hero, expanding their range of attack types and defensive boosts. Find, trade for, or craft new equipment to improve your characters and make them versatile and adaptable.

  • Complex tactical turn-based battles: a variety of elaborate enemies won't let you complete the whole game using a single tactic or invincible team build. Choose wisely the squad you take in a fight - proper positioning and awareness are essential to your success struggling against powerful foes.

  • The vivid and diverse world of Ree'fah: immerse yourself in the hand-painted fantasy universe of Grimshade and discover an impressive history in more than 30 hours of an exciting journey.
Grimshade is an entire world filled with exciting discoveries and awesome adventures, creating an epic RPG.
More information.
 
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Anyone tried it yet?
 
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I received my key the other day but no, I've not tried it yet and no plans to rush into it anytime soon, I'll let the obligatory updates land first. I will give the developers credit though, I didn't have to jump through hoops to get my key, it was delivered to me completely pain-free.
 
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I remember not backing this one on KS because of seasons and season pass whatnot in the project.

However as the development moved on, the game promised handcrafted scenarios instead of the recent procedurally generated lazyarse cancer that's spreading like crazy in gaming industry.

Breezed through steam forum, there are some child diseases: typos in text, borked textures (restart game solves this), dialogue not displayed properly if resolution is lower than 1080p, one quest not doable, etc, nothing serious. @Kordanor; is already submitting "suspicious" game behavior there so we have an inside man. ;)

Also some more important details by the game's developer:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/858100/discussions/0/1848072002762930730/
The game will allow you to save anywhere you want (except battles, cutscenes and dialogues) using the Main Menu button. :) Also, it autosaves your game session every time you move to another location and win the battle.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/858100/discussions/0/1841314700698684334/ - adapted:
1. The general storyline is linear, and you'll guide a band of heroes through the story of growing war searching for the real causes of what happened. But the game pushes you to choose in numerous external activities — pick a side quest or abandon it, decide whom you'll help or ignore at all, which side you'll take in battles, and which motives drive you revealing plot-related puzzles.
All these choices will matter in the end. They will affect your exploration progress, character's relationships, the variety of tools you can use in battles, and in some ways the end of the story.
So, you've got a main linear storyline. Different plot events (quests, battles and cutscenes) happen in a certain order, guiding you through the world. But you've got numerous side activities, where you can skip or resolve quests, explore locations, resolve battles, find some easter eggs etc. Each time you'll proceed from this "free exploration" further through the plot, the game will warn you.

You can't fail the main quest. The ending of the game strictly depends on the decisions you've taken during the whole game. And it's based on the character's relationships. :)

2. All characters are pre-set, and you'll be able to customise their battle skills through the equipment.

3. Yes, game settings allow you to adjust the control keys.

The 3rd point is awsome right? There is something even more awsome - the game doesn't officially support mushrooms! Yup, it's k+m game.

That and the price they ask for it, hell I have to forget season pass scandal and am buying it as soon as I get home.
 
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The first patch is out and is supposed to fix everything reported so far (except some odd report where people are randomly unable to move during a fight).
https://steamstore-a.akamaihd.net/n...m_community_announcements/2465065785295178319
1. Kiba stopped wearing the spacesuit after his nightmare in Spicy Wind tavern.

2. Screen resolution issues fixed — If you've already played the game, please check in-game Settings (not Unity) and choose your native screen resolution. If your screen resolution is lesser that recommended (1920x1080), it can misbehave but shouldn't crop a half of your dialogue window.

3. Lots of small minor things fixed.
 
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Played about 6 hours so far and I also like it so far.

It feels like high production value in terms of graphics and music.

There are a lot of spelling errors in the english version. I encountered about 2 spelling errors per hour. Make it 3 if you don't read everything out load and go much faster through the text.

The other issue I have with the game so far is the visibility of combat mechanics.
It's showing some stuff, but it's not showing all stuff.
So one thing which the combat really needs is a display of estimated damage.
What you basically need to do every time you want to know your damage is to go into the tooltip of the skill (text) remember the damage mentioned there, then right click on the enemy so see his armor, check is modifiers and calculate the damage you'd actually too. Which is really unnecessary work for the player. Also damage and damagetype by themselves should be displayed on an ability instead of just in text in the "flavor-description".

Whether the combat is good or not, I cannot really judge yet. I like it so far in the first 7 hours.

The story is somewhat weird. Including humanoid badgers and space-shuttles like the space-shuttlegirl in wizardry uses...so...might not be everyone's cup of tea.
And there is lots and lots of text. It's not going into wall of text terriroty as SR: Hong Kong though.
 
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What are the character classes? What was character creation like? Is it companions with scripts or all your own making? What's the loot like? What's the enemy variety like?
 
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What are the character classes? What was character creation like? Is it companions with scripts or all your own making? What's the loot like? What's the enemy variety like?

There is no character classes in that way and there is no character creation.

You are using pre-defined characters, and all of these characters have their own set of abilities and they function extremely differently from each other.

The different party characters are also constantly contributing in the dialogues, so they are an integral part of the story.

The combat is turn based, and you also control all party members yourself. Sometimes you have some NPC guards fighting on your side, which are Computer controlled then.

Loot: Only looted crafting items yet, but crafting hasn't been fully explained yet, so I cannot really judge that.

The enemy variety: So far I encountered about 3 different parts of "slimes" or so, and 3 or 4 different "Soldier" enemies which had different sets of abilities.
It's not a lot, but its enough for the first couple of hours. In fact, due to the issues with visibility of skills, it would be rather bad if the variety was much higher and you would need to read every single tooltip of every single opponent.
 
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Played about 6 hours so far and I also like it so far.
Me too. Both. Steam says 6, and I like the game!
Whether the combat is good or not, I cannot really judge yet.
Combat is good. Coming from me it means nothing, any combat system is good for me. ;)
crafting hasn't been fully explained yet, so I cannot really judge that.
Earlygame crafting is not needed (playing on normal) and you can craft only the badger's consumable initially (do it for sakes of tutorial). Once you finish the certain main quest (3 stash and 3 bases) you'll be able to craft a certain consumable for the sentinel. You'll receive from NPCs (and loot) some consumables for the assassin lady, probably craftable later.

Except ingredients, you'll also loot certain shards used to improve skills on sentinel and the assassin lady. The element is important - you can't use water shards to improve a dark skill. As initially you won't have an air skills based companion in the party, all air shards will be rotting in your inventory till you find one. When will that happen, dunno. Not early. ;)

Some trashmobs respawn, but the loot from those is deliberately junk and you should just avoid those - there is no XP to gather, just shards. So far none of respawnable groups dropped a shard on me, just a few ingredients vulgaris.
Note that once you do something, like pwning 3 enemy bases in the game's early quest, these trashmobs stop respawning.
To remain on the safe side, I suggest disposing of all trashmobs you notice once, if they reappear later just ignore them.
One thing is sure. Questrelated trashmobs, unless bugged, when killed won't respawn ever.

There are choices in the game, but I'm not sure about the possible impact those have on the world. So far seems it's reward related. An example - during a certain sidequest you'll agree to jail a woman or you'll help her. Dunno what happens if you let the army to drag her away, but I opted to defend her and after the fight she gave me a nice pair of shoes for the assassin lady.

Enemy variety is a bit more than Kordanor noted. Except slimes which are a sort of darkspawn, there is another type of darkspawn with aoe/line damage you encounter during a sidequest. Not too hard to kill.
Human opponents so far I saw 6 types and am using a bit of description - hovering buffer, frontline displacer, frontline shielder, rifleman, staff mage (kill it asap or break his "meditation") and spearman (this one throws two spears on the ground near your people then electrocutes both).
There is a 7th type but he was on my side, it's a sort of sentinel with aoe damage on the back line skill.
Remember, it's trashmobs variety earlygame I'm talking about. I also didn't count trio of bandits which seem to be an unique encounter (you fight against them twice, the first time you can't win). Most probably there will be more variations later.
 
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The steam comments are pretty harsh is the game really that bad ?

The game itself is nice to far, but it's has its technical issues here and there.

The good thing: The developer seems to be very fast with patching this stuff.
 
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Yesterday a new patch went live that addresses combat issues (inability to change positions) but it broke dialogues. That will be corrected later today.

Anyway, I didn't push forward with the game because of that (and also I didn't have much time yesterday). Instead I retried a certain battle several times to protect a champion that normally dies during it.
Just when I thought I've finally done it, the stupid schmuck went "tired" and got killed. :)
Won't be letting this go, I still have a few ideas that could work. On normal, ofc. Not on easy, didn't lower the difficulty.

If this sounds confusing - at certain point you'll be trying to protect a guy but the game doesn't end when he dies during the fight, you'll face a bunch of "darkspawn" next. As if his death is scripted to happen.
However, by good positioning, blind and confuse skill, "proper" targets sequence - I feel it might be possible to save him. Perhaps I'm too excited to see what happens if you manage it, but one thing is sure, this bloody game is fun. I won't be disappointed if he dies anyway by some afterbattle means, the fun part is the combat system that feels like a puzzle you need to crack. And then people are confused when I react with lol on every mention of Dark Souls being challenging/hard.
 
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Yeah, I played about 1-2h after that and experienced some major issues in dialogues after that. There was another patch today. So maybe these are already fixed now.
 
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Well I won't be home for next couple of hours so cannot know yet. :(
After the patch yesterday, dialogues, all, went all over the place. Better safe than sorry, I didn't want to proceed and risk corrupt savegames. ;)

The thing that rarely happens with me - I'm still thinking about what I'll do next in this silly game when I return. Usually I don't think about a game subconsciously when not in front of my PC.

What I'm practically saying - it's still too early to judge it whole, I'm also to blame for not backing it on KS (then again they asked me not to by talking about season passes), but if the game continues to keep me excited it earned my vote on the next goty poll.
 
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You are some very brave folks, those that attempt to play a game on the first day/week/month of release. I for one thank you for all your additional testing!
 
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Cmon it's not even close to Skyrim brokeness, a smallbug here and there, nothing extraordinary. Besides, the new patch that fixes dialogues and some more quirks just appeared.

Anyway, I did it! With losses ofc… :D
Picproof:
pic.jpg


The strategy? Nothing extraordinary - blind one marksman, use the 2 actions pot on the sentinel, kill displacer then the hovering bitch. Everyone in your party except the assassin will get KOed, but the hero has AoE damage skill so he'll basically take care of all marksmen.

Should you go for it? No. It lasts for too long and the victory doesn't change anything - the hero will die after the battle automatically and "darkspawn" will still appear. And because 3 of your party members were previously KOed, the next fight will be impossible to win.
So basically just wait and wait till the champion dies. But honestly, cracking "this" was fun.
 
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The first professional review appeared (PC version):
https://www.indiegamewebsite.com/2019/03/29/grimshade-review/
Style and substance are a hard duo to balance, especially in the indie world where budget choices closely reflect which avenue held more importance for the devs, but this game skews that delicate equilibrium all too often. I still have hope for future developments, and the game may appeal to more fervent JRPG fans, but as it stands Grimshade is a little underwhelming. The stronger elements such as combat, art direction, and sound design are held back by the technical issues, odd design decisions and weak narrative, taking itself far too seriously when – if simplified – this could be a truly fun turn-based combat game.

5/10
A score too harsh if you ask me. The author turned blind eye on two things.
One is that without some trashmobs respawning the game would be much better (although most of them the player can avoid). Another is that the game, on normal difficulty, soon becomes not normal but hard. Which is refreshing for gaming industry entries recently - if I wanted to play nonchallenging games I'd go grind in DarkSouls. :)

Completely agree with his remarks on the story though. It's definetly mediocre and doesn't make a player interested in the world and it's characters much. What kills it even more is that it lacks of humor.

I'm still obsessed with the game, sadly due to several unexpected things couldn't play it much over the weekend.
 
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Worth mentioning is maybe that that already released 7 patches with some bug fixes and also quality of life improvements like the option to increase combat speed.
 
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