GRIME II

My first few hours with GRIME II felt like being dropped into a painting that was quietly trying to eat me. Clover Bite's sequel to their 2021 cult original is a Souls-inflected metroidvania where you play as the Formless, a nameless art mimic born into a civilization obsessed with creation, handed nothing but a cosmic hunger and a maul that literally chews on whatever it hits. That premise could read as genre-flavored gibberish, but the world earns every strange inch of it. The combat is where GRIME II asks the most of you, and also where it gives the most back. Three resources govern every fight: Force, the stamina-adjacent gauge that rewards aggression with bonus damage; Breath, which charges your healing; and Paint, spent on Mold abilities. The Mold system is the standout mechanic - by stunning enemies and dashing into them, you absorb their form and can equip up to three stolen abilities at once, deploying them offensively, defensively, or as decoys to steal a boss's attention while you recover. Pair that with a parry that comes in multiple forms, including the Grasp Counter that latches onto open enemies and creates big damage windows, and the combat loop has genuine depth. When it clicks, the rhythm of reading telegraphs, landing a Grasp Counter, burning a Mold ability, then chaining into a weapon combo feels like a language you've spent hours learning to speak. Bosses run multi-phase movesets and gate your healing recovery behind phase transitions, so brute force simply does not work here. Weapon variety is generous - over 30 options from heavy axes to throwing daggers, each scaling differently - and the game resists pushing you toward a single playstyle. Traversal grows over time too, unlocking grappling, air dashing, wall climbing, ceiling sliding, and charged jumps, all of which enrich the platforming considerably. The world itself is one of the most visually distinct things in the genre right now: opulent bronzes layered over grotesque anatomy, a hands-everywhere motif that starts in the Temple of Hands with its Spiked Fingers and Curled Fingers enemies and bleeds into boss design throughout. Each region has its own palette and internal logic, never feeling like a reskinned biome. The soundtrack gives many areas a haunting quality that genuinely asks you to stop and absorb the atmosphere. Not everything lands cleanly. The map system asks you to find hidden Seals before unlocking cartography and fast travel in any given area, which means early exploration carries real risk and no safety net - some players will find that thrilling, others will find it a chore. The narrative is deliberately cryptic and occasionally crosses from atmospheric into simply sparse, with dialogue that drags rather than rewards. A handful of persistent bugs showed up in launch coverage, and some critics noted that the exploration and RPG layers feel less cohesive than the combat. There is an accessibility mode that reduces enemy aggression and damage taken, though it does lock some achievements - a reasonable tradeoff if the default difficulty is blocking you from the world rather than making you appreciate it. Critic reception landed around an 80 on Metacritic across fourteen reviews, with user scores sitting at 7.4. The honest read: this is a sequel that expands everything the first game did well without fundamentally reinventing itself, and that is enough. For the specific kind of player who wants a 30-plus hour metroidvania with a handcrafted visual identity, layered combat, and a world that reveals itself slowly rather than explaining itself upfront, GRIME II is one of the stronger arguments the genre has made recently.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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