GRIME II review

Tragically, the metroidvania has become a victim of its own success. Given that dozens of genre entries now compete for your time and money, new titles can’t just aim for basic competency anymore. Instead, each new upstart is forced to compete in a world where Hollow Knight already exists. GRIME II, the follow-up to Clover Bite’s 2021 original, delivers one of the more imaginative blends of action and exploration in recent memory. But sadly, complication and difficulty spikes hamper an otherwise creative experience.

In the first GRIME, you were a creature with a black hole head tasked with exploring a world of crumbling stone and eccentric adversaries, the sequel builds on these foundations. You are now called a Formless, the name given for a mimic without fixed identity. You are born into a civilization obsessed with creation. Sparce bits of text are burdened with doing the some of the world-building, sporadically providing you with nebulous dialog choices, which don’t offer much impact on the storyline.

A Genre Crushed by Its Own Greatness

Unlike the drab landscapes of its predecessor, GRIME II takes place in environments that are filled with vibrant color. More importantly, the peculiar-looking enemies you’ll encounter look like they are native to each zone. The game purports to send you through areas draped in different kinds of artistic motifs. But for better or worse, GRIME II’s visuals are consistently surreal.

The opening zone fills its corridors with creatures literally made of fingers, from spiked ones, curled ones, and even plunging digits. It’s all quite dreamlike, and admittingly beautiful, but not quite expressive enough to tackle the game’s expositional ambitions. As such, the focus is on play rather than plot, which is common for the genre.

That said, the look of GRIME II is its greatest achievement. Clover Bite paints its landscapes and subjects with a palette of opulent bronzes, deep indigos, and blood reds, all layered over architecture that incorporates grotesque anatomical shapes. The recurring motif of hands jut from walls, ceilings, and are the spotlight in several boss fights. Interestingly, they’re not used for visual novelty but the creation of a living, breathing nightmare. Best of all, each new region feels genuinely distinct, not like a reskin of the last biome.

Build-A-Beast Workshop

The central gameplay hook of GRIME II is rooted in the mold system. As you defeat enemies, you absorb their essence and learn to summon diminutive copies of them. These molds can be deployed offensively, defensively, or even as decoys to absorb a boss’s attention while you recover. Some throw projectiles, others stun enemies, and a handful function as temporary summons that intercept attacks on your behalf. You can have four active at once, and they’re replenished through combat and item pickups.

It sits alongside a weapon system that’s nearly as versatile. The range of weaponry includes axes, spears, bows, and more exotic items. Pleasingly, the game doesn’t push you toward any single playstyle. Swapping between two equipped weapons mid-combat opens up further combinations, and the game’s resource bars add another layer of management to every encounter.

Parry This, You Filthy Sculpture

But it’s here, where GRIME II begins to stumble. This is a game that keeps introducing new mechanics before existing ones have an opportunity to flourish. Beyond the molds and the dual weapons, there are grasp counters, dash counters, environmental hazards to weaponize, a force meter that rewards stationary attacking with bonus damage, a skill tree that modifies how force accumulates, item molds that rank up across multiple tiers, pigments for further customization, and a whole complicated stat system. None of these systems are incoherent, and there’s an internal logic to each one.  But the cumulative encumbrance of all of them can feel overwhelming, especially in the early- to mid-game.

The parry system is a core mechanic in GRIME II, and there’s a multitude of variations. From traditional parries, grasp parries that latch onto enemies at range, dash counters, and even weapon-specific parry triggers, there’s a multitude of ways to respond to attacks. Where many games would have incorporated a simple block button, GRIME II wants combat to seem almost chorographic, as you read an attack, respond, absorb the resulting mold, and chain that into an ability.

When Weird Stops Working

But the trouble here is the enemies. GRIME II‘s creature design is one of its great strengths, but that surrealism cuts both ways. Animals built around hands, half-formed clay beings, abstract beings made from paint and sculpture move with a volatility that visually striking but also quite treacherous. But predicting when to parry requires reading an animation, and animations belong to creatures that do not move like anything you have encountered before.  As such, the window for window can be a bit ambiguous, at least until you study their movements.

So, you’ll die not because you were careless but because a tendril beast’s attack arc behaved in a way you weren’t ready for. Sure, the game’s commitment to weird movement is admirable. But blowing a timing dependent defense is a real and reoccurring issue with GRIME II. Certain enemies compound this with attacks that cannot be parried at all, or with animations that continue through your own attack. Fighting multiple enemies simultaneously exacerbates these issues, leading to some moments of controller-tossing frustration.

As much as I wanted to like GRIME II’s unapologetic weirdness, it too often feels like that very strangeness gets in the way of enjoyment. The same surreal design choices that make its world so memorable also impairs combat readability and overloads the player with systems that rarely take the time to let players master them. What should feel inventive often becomes exhausting, as the game struggles to balance its ambition with clarity. GRIME II is a fascinating but frustrating experience, it’s a game where creativity is never in short supply, yet too often comes at the cost of fun.

GRIME II was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.