It feels like I’ve seen Grim Dawn on steam for full well a decade now. It turns out, as the way time flows, it’s only been five years. There it sat, waiting for me to buy it lonely in my wishlist. The time finally came that I made some sort of decision, and with the passing of the last Summer Sale it ended up in my possession.
Grim Dawn itself is a dark hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. The kind of game that opens with the closeup of a warped body laying on the floor. Where you marshall steel and bullet against the hordes of the underworld. This is, in a manner of speaking, a way to say Grim Dawn is for people who love Diablo.
The hack-and-slash genre is one of the solo actor places against the thread of an overwhelming onslaught of darkness. There are as many varieties of flavor to this recipe as there are types of ghouls to kill. As the power of video game consoles has increased, we move away from the small pitched dungeon encounters and towards excess. Hack and Slash as a genre now is almost about offering as many possibilites to slam, shatter and slash as there are. What fantastic tools do these games marshal in the service of killing evil – from Swords to hurling balls of arcane energy. Great looming armies of summoned swords cutting deep into the flesh of whatever the world can spit at you.
I first came to Tristram like any fool would. Not all fools, after all, are desperate. Not all desperate men are fools. There is a shared shred among the two of them and that is the spirit I am of. What they share both is often a lack of something to live for.
Warrior is what they call me – I was not always this man. Now that I am I see it as an inescapable duty to march into the darkness. What else have the world to give to me? So I was told to go to Tristram, a town, a place for people like me. The desperate, the foolish.
Grim Dawn is not a game that waits to introduce you to its tone. It tells you with all of the bluster it can: the world is doomed, you are twisted and broken and the only person currently caught up in the middle. Take your sword and pick yourself up off of the ground. There is evil that needs to be killed and you are the one to do it. In mere moments outside the tutorial the player will find themselves killing their first boss of note. By this time I was able to hurl bolts of sharp light in any direction. I could swing my sword once and cleave the bodies of four or five. There was no time to stop and study the lay of the land, what little it yielded. I enjoy the guiltless killing.
Lord, they tell me I am the one to kill this evil. An old man in the center of this damned place told me what I needed to know. The archbishop of the church betrayed the town and unsealed a great evil. This is what I have been sent to: another poor soul in a no doubt long line who either has the conviction to march into that Church or a willingness to die elsewise. I talk to the injured boy, the hopeless blacksmith. All of them give me their support. I see in their faces that it is hollow, my failure will simply mean they face death sooner rather than later.
Tonight I will march into the crypt. I place no faith in my own wit. If I leave it is simply because I can still do the only thing left to me.
Under the gaze of a sky the player will never see, the world seems to be a place stripped of all former value. People lay huddled and broken as they are want to do. The loop of the hack-n-slash is one that does not seem to ever change much. Take whatever I can into some forbidden, god-forsaken place and cut and shoot and immolate my way through the defiled hordes of some great or lesser evil. As our abilities have grown in the years so to has their splendor. Great shocks of magic thunder through small PC-speakers. Zombies at every stage of decomposition explode or tumble to the ground neatly cut in half. Ten or twenty more lumber out of the shadows. This will not take long, it never does. All I do is kill kill kill, like a lawnmower. At some point, it stops being exciting.
The Crypt is a foul place. Thick is the smell of the Archbishop’s betrayal, rising out of the bodies of the faithful as they become one with the ancient stonework. My eyes grasped first at the darkness, and then the shadows around their bodies I could see. The left behind forms of the holy, claw and sinew. There is not much else to a man at the end of it – to say I am any different than the evils down there is a naive one. My sword often found purchase in the face of a creature that looked all too familiar when some light spilled into the catacomb. Each encounter left my body weary and drained – very little did I have beyond my sword or whatever else I could find.
The hunt and craving for more has filtered again from the realm of Big Blockbuster into everywhere. I imagine a design document that says I should never run out of things to kill – little or big. Nor should I ever find myself with lack of new abilities to try out or another little widget to slot into my weapon. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Some part of me wants to go back to Diablo and it’s implings that appeared out of the shadows to harass and fled. Of the terror of seeing some unnamed thing move in the corner of your vision. The name is Grim Dawn but for the most part I feel like a lawnmower. Feed me flesh so that I might chew it to appease the experience gods.
Rest came neither easy nor quick tonight. In the times my eyes would close, I could see Them again. The familiar bodies. The way their hands would feel like the hand of any other. That no matter how their skin was pulled over their body it felt like the type I had so often felt around my blade before.
I will go deeper into the Catacomb now. I hear talk of some thing waiting down there – an implacable killer of hundreds they call The Butcher. I have been told the wounds he causes never heal, and that if not I it will be someone else tomorrow. Eventually, the townspeople fear The Butcher will come for them too.
That is the language of games as we’ve been presented, isn’t it? Players derive their feelings of success from cutting down hundreds if they can. Endless amounts of ragdolls to watch be dismembered in new and interesting ways. That’s who we are and who we have to be. What kind of thrill is there to a dark catacomb, where the evil is always just out of sight? At some point I am in a trance. Grim Dawn may throw increasingly large horrors at me, they all die the same. Bring on the next.
As they say, Fresh Meat.