GRAPPIN

I have a soft spot for games that fit inside a single developer's vision, and GRAPPIN is exactly that kind of artifact. POLYLABO - essentially one person with a composer named Benoit Malis alongside - built a first-person climbing adventure around a single tool: the Grip, a grappling hook that becomes your entire vocabulary for moving through the world. You wake in a cave, hear a mysterious voice, and then step out into a mountain valley that genuinely surprises with how open and inviting it feels for something so small in scope. The main story runs around three hours. That runtime is intentional, and in the middle stretch the game knows exactly what it is. The Grip comes in two forms. The Normal Grip snaps you to clay surfaces in the environment, those scattered blocks and boards you learn to read like a climbing route. The Trace Grip covers much greater distances at speed, better suited to backtracking and scanning for secrets. Chaining the two together through a series of biomes - open woodland valleys, blazing lava caves, icy exposed ridges near the summit - gives the traversal a rhythm that clicks once you stop fighting it. The reticule turns yellow when you are in range of a clay anchor, and there is a dedicated 180-degree turn button for reversing mid-air, both small design decisions that show care. Relics, over fifty of them, sit tucked into hard-to-reach corners across every area. Collecting enough unlocks the path forward, so exploration is structurally rewarded rather than purely cosmetic. Benoit Malis's soundtrack is the quiet backbone of the experience. Calm, slightly ethereal, never demanding attention but always present in a way that makes the mountain feel like it has its own inner life. The visuals lean on simple geometry and strong color palettes per biome - nothing technically demanding, but each environment reads clearly and the early open valley is genuinely pretty to look down from. Animals wander. The world breathes just enough. Here is where honesty matters. The difficulty curve in the final stages is uneven in ways that feel unintentional. The physics drift slightly floaty at times, and first-person platforming over long drops punishes missed jumps in ways that owe more to camera angle than player error. Post-launch patches added checkpoints in the summit area and adjusted overall difficulty, which helped, but the late-game still tests patience before it tests skill. Aim assist on controller has had moments of misbehaving, locking onto clay blocks and refusing to let you look away. These are not deal-breakers for a three-hour game with a price that reflects its scale, but they are real friction points worth naming. For players who respond to atmospheric solo adventures and do not mind a rough edge or two near the finish line, GRAPPIN rewards the climb. The ending carries a genuine twist that critics consistently called intriguing, and the journey up that mountain has enough quiet charm to justify the session. Think of it less as a precision platformer and more as a mood piece that occasionally asks you to be precise.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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