Spider-bashing in Legend of Grimrock

[davidn]

In the middle of my recovery period, I talked about playing through Legend of Grimrock - a dungeon crawler that shockingly I rather enjoyed, with the only real fault I could pick out being that it was a dungeon crawler.

Near the start of my exploration through it, a couple of people asked me to put it on Livestream so that they could watch it being played - I had forgotten I had the recording because it consisted of over an hour of wandering around lost, but as it had been a while since I posted a game video, I compressed the good bits down into just over ten minutes of conversational muttering punctuated with the occasional scream as one of the game's many giant spiders sneaks up behind me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uI2Znx1gEE

There are no spoilers in this video apart from showing you a couple of self-made spreadsheet maps - but if you want to play Legend of Grimrock, this is pretty much what you can expect from it.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Okay, wow -- I see what you mean about it being weird that they think in a grid -- in screenshots, somehow I imagined the pace as being much more deilberate and chess-like, maybe something like FF Tactics.... but, those spiders are wriggling around perfectly naturally, and RAPIDLY, and..... reconciling that with how orderly their behaviour is in practice is.... rather weird!

Is it fun making your own maps? It seems sort of like it would be, but I think the knowledge that the game COULD be doing it for me (especially given that this one actually has an OPTION to, if I'm remembering right?) might kinda spoil it for me... that and how redundant the work would be, in terms of other users generating the same thing.... (then again, I ADORED deciphering the Fez alphabet (before realising that there was a 'quick brown fox' rosetta stone and I was doing it the hard way) even though other people already had -- but that was a puzzle, not just grunt work.... when it came to the actual translation, I actually gave up after a while because THAT part was just grunt work...)

Oh god, spider during the spreadsheet XD;; I hadn't thought about the fact that the game's clock keeps ticking while you draw.. Okay, that actually adds an interesting bit of roleplaying to the mapping....!

"Maybe these people are just really tiny".... hah, suddenly that just made this whole world that much cuter somehow! I can't help but picture a band of adventuring fraggles :)

Okay -- I yelped at the sudden rear spider attack XD

Oh my goodness, I very much want someone to draw the confused knitting spider now.... "god, this is so much easier when it's with my butt...!!"

MAN this is making me miss Bard's Tale...! Why are adventurey labyrinths so compelling :)

[davidn]

Naturally and rapidly and scarily! The way they dart about, faster than anything else in the game up until that point... it's really frightening, especially as they can seem to appear out of nowhere like that.

Drawing my own map was great fun for the first two floors, after which I got utterly fed up with it - it did seem to be just unnecessary work after the computer had offered to do it for me. There's a certain feeling of pride in successfully navigating and mapping something, but it can feel like a lot of work that takes away from just exploring the game - Etrian Odyssey had the right level here, where it would fill in explored tiles for you and you only had to concern yourself with recording the walls (and in a way that didn't take you out of the game at all).

Your alphabet experience sounds like my own, when exploring Commander Keen :) It was sort of incredible to realize that the signs I had been seeing throughout the game actually had meaning to them, when translations of individual letters started appearing... and being able to gradually fill in the blanks and read them really was special. Eventually, there was a level with the entire alphabet somewhere in a secret area near the top, and after working through it based on occasional clues until then, it really did feel like discovering the Rosetta Stone.

Here is a confused knitting spider! And two plasticine cats, one of which is named after a Chinese dictator. Also a sound man who's swallowed a canister of helium and and an entire bag of cane sugar.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I wish I turned into math when I get confused.

Y'know what, the design of those cats is absolutely adorable, for something that seems like it almost could have been nightmarish...!

Did you just find this, or remember it..?

[davidn]

I saw it on early morning television once when I was about ten, and half thought I'd just dreamt this bizarre plasticine world with the T-1000 style morphing cats - it was so unique that I remembered it ever since (though I'm not sure which particular episode I saw). It is always good to have some confirmation that the things I grew up with were verifiably real.

I do remember knowing that Mao was the name of someone from China who was a bit dodgy, even then - thanks to Civilization!