Legend of Grimrock 2

Legend of Grimrock 2 is a first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler that wears its 1990s Dungeon Master DNA openly and without apology. Four shipwrecked prisoners wash up on the Isle of Nex, and from that lean setup you get roughly twenty-plus hours of methodical exploration, brutal combat, and some of the most satisfying environmental puzzles you will find in any RPG released in the past decade. Almost Human Games took everything that worked in the first Grimrock, dragged it out of a single underground dungeon, and spread it across a surface overworld, ancient temples, swamps, and crypts. The variety alone is a meaningful upgrade. The combat runs on real-time movement inside a strict grid, which sounds limiting until you realize the whole tactical layer lives in that grid. Positioning matters. Attack cooldowns matter. Knowing when to retreat one square and bait an enemy into an attack animation is the difference between a clean fight and watching your mage bleed out. Character building is class-and-skill-tree driven: you pick from Fighters, Rogues, Mages, and Barbarians at the start, then spend skill points in specializations like Assassination, Spellcraft, or Armour as you level. A well-composed party of four with complementary builds handles Nex very differently than a sloppy one, and there is genuine replayability in trying a ranged-heavy or full-mage setup on a second run. Build variety holds up past the midgame, which is not something every RPG in this space can claim. The puzzle design is where Grimrock 2 genuinely earns its reputation. Pressure plates, hidden switches, projectile puzzles, timed sequences, star-alignment riddles - the island layers these constantly and rarely repeats itself. A few puzzles cross the line from challenging into obtuse, and you will probably consult a guide at least once without shame. The writing is sparse almost to a fault: lore comes in short stone tablets and item descriptions rather than dialogue trees, so if you need a rich cast of NPCs to stay invested, this is the wrong island for you. The narrative payoff is quiet and environmental, closer to a From Software approach than a Larian one. What does not work as well: the inventory and item management UI feels dated even accounting for the retro aesthetic. Loot identification requires scrolls that you will occasionally run dry on at annoying moments, and a couple of the late-game dungeon sections tip from difficult into tedious with enemy density that feels more like padding than design. The game also does nothing to hold your hand, which is either a feature or a bug depending entirely on your tolerance for dying to something you did not realize was a mechanic. For players who grew up with Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, or even the first Grimrock, this is the sharper and more ambitious follow-up those games deserved. For RPG players coming from story-heavy or open-world backgrounds, the adjustment is real but worth making if you have any patience for systems-driven exploration. The Isle of Nex is a hostile, clever, and occasionally maddening place, and reaching its final stretch with a party you actually built from scratch feels earned in a way that few dungeon crawlers manage.

Monika · Scout Team

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