Destructoid review: American McGee's Grimm: A Boy Learns What Fear Is

7:34 PM on 07.31.2008   |   Anthony Burch

48 comments

A Boy Learns What Fear Is is the first episode in a weekly, 24-part series revolving around the fracturing of classic fairy tales at the hands of the series' protagonist, Grimm.

Being that episodic gaming turns out to be either lousy and eventually canceled (Sin) or incredibly awesome and entertaining (Sam and Max), Grimm is an interesting proposition. Episodic gaming has never been done with such frequency before, and certainly never with the sort of "run around, turn things evil, pee on stuff, and buttstomp the ground a lot" gameplay Grimm offers.

Given that the first episode is available as a free download today, you might want to hit the jump and find out if Grimm is worth your time, or just Bad Day L.A. in Mother Goose land.

American McGee's Grimm: A Boy Learns What Fear Is (PC)
Developed by Spicy Horse
Published by Gametap

Released on July 31, 2008

Download A Boy Learns What Fear Is. Right now. I'm not joking in the least: read this review after you've started the download, whatever, but I've heard that the free download link will disappear after 24 hours. If you don't wanna follow through after reading the review, you can always cancel the download.

Now, you might think that warning to be a rather obvious endorsement of the game: that, by encouraging you to download it as soon as possible, I'm suggesting that the game is a quality addition to episodic gaming, and fully worth the forty-five minutes it will take you to play through.

You'd be wrong.

Based on The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, the game opens with a way-too-long puppet theatre style cut scene wherein Grimm relays the entire plot of the original, way-too-happy fairy tale to the player. This prologue merely serves to illustrate to the player the world they will be corrupting and destroying once the gameplay begins, but it's really just an annoyance: you end up going to each of the fairy tale's five scenes anyway, complete with a short summary of events by Grimm, so why bother telling the whole story at the beginning? 

Once the game begins, though, things begin to perk up. The controls are very simple, considering the majority of the gameplay really just boils down to running around a lot and touching things. I don't want to spend too much time detailing exactly which button does what, as Justin's preview of the game does a fantastic job of summarizing exactly what you'll see and do in the first episode (to the point where I almost wish I could just copy-paste everything he wrote and then write my personal opinion), but suffice it to say that the game is very Katamari Damacy-esque in nature.

By stinking up and corrupting small areas of the world -- flowers, rocks, bushes -- you'll upgrade your stinkiness meter and be able to corrupt even larger things, which will further upgrade the meter and allow you to corrupt even larger things, and so on and so forth. There's a definite sense of escalation and power one feels as Grimm runs around the too-happy areas, a radius of black evil around Grimm's feet corrupts everything in its path, turning flowers into knives or bushes into tombstones. Simply being able to run around the levels, watching as your character effortlessly transforms the entire world into a malevolent version of its former self, gave me the exact sort of satisfaction I got from finally getting my Katamari large enough to roll up humans and cows in We Love Katamari. Gameplay-wise, Grimm is damned simple, but the visual rewards make the whole experience a lot richer.

If you can get it to run, anyway. This was originally meant to be a multi-man review, but two of our editors' CPU specifications weren't up to snuff, and even though I can technically play the game through from end to end, it chugs like hell around the halfway point of every scene. All the evil stuff is more animated and graphically intensive than the nice stuff, so the further you get through each level, the slower and slower the game tends to get. Given the simplistic, almost PS2-era graphics, I find this to be simultaneously confusing and inadmissible: why should a short, simple episodic game be such a damn resource hog?

However, even if you do have a computer capable of running it on the highest settings without lag, you'll still be aching for the episode to be over a few minutes before it actually does. The essential problemis that the "corrupt stuff" gameplay, despite being very visually interesting for the first one or two scenes, gets old fast. Even though the episode is less than an hour long, the gameplay still manages to get stale simply due to the fact that it never evolves in any significant way: in each of the game's five scenes, you will be doing nothing more than running around until you've built up a sufficient stink rating to open a gate to the next area, then getting a higher stink rating so you can buttstomp the final obstacle and end the level.

The designers must have assumed that the different environments would somehow make up for the fact that you're doing the exact same thing over and over, but the game's redundant nature becomes readily apparent after only twenty minutes of play. Frankly, I'm amazed they have so many episodes planned: if the gameplay couldn't sustain itself through a single episode, how in blue hell is it going to remain fresh throughout the next 23? 

This is why I urged you to download the first episode at the beginning of the article: as far as I can tell, that's all American McGee's Grimm is, was, and ever will be. Unless massive changes are made to the subsequent episodes, you'll find all the gameplay the entire series has to offer in that single, free episode, and by the time you're done with it, you'll be perfectly happy never to pick up another episode (if, once again, you can run it in the first place). Fun for a while, but buggy and slow with a dull story, unfunny jokes, and gameplay which is eventually repetitive to the point of frustration, A Boy Learns What Fear Is should only be played if you can download it for free from the link above.

Score: 3.5 (An admirable effort with a sliver of promise, but essentially mediocre.)

Review postscript:

On an unrelated note, am I the only person who doesn't find running through a happy town, turning a swingset with two kids on it into a gallows with two dead children hanging from it particularly fun? I mean, I get that it's meant to be "dark," but the character's fart noises and pissing power give the whole experience an assumed happy-go-lucky vibe. It's kind of hard to maintain that when you're running throughout a forest, literally killing a hundred innocent people with ropes around their necks, who twist and convulse in the breeze as you remove the supports from their feet. I'm not taking off points for that or anything, I just thought it was worth mentioning.