Grim Trials

The best idea in Grim Trials is that your character arc starts after the funeral, and that alone carried me further into it than I expected. You are dead. You have been enrolled. The Academy is a training ground for aspiring Grim Reapers, and the curriculum is exactly what it sounds like: learn the job, pass the trials, earn the right to keep existing in whatever form the afterlife allows. Glory Jam and Soft Source put this out on PC in August 2026, and it plays as an action adventure RPG with the emphasis firmly on action. You hack, you blast, you clear a gauntlet, and between gauntlets you talk to people who are as dead as you are. Combat is the spine, and it is built for a pad. Full controller support, DualShock and DualSense mapping, and a gamepad recommendation are not decoration here. There is a keyboard-only option, but the moment-to-moment rhythm of melee pressure and ranged punctuation reads like it was designed with sticks and triggers in hand. The trials themselves are the structure of the game, which cuts both ways. It gives every stretch of story a clear gate and a clear reward, and it also means the game asks you to fight roughly as often as it asks you to feel anything. I would rather a game repeat a combat loop it is confident in than inflate its runtime with fetch quests and padded XP grinds, and Grim Trials mostly picks the former. The writing is where I ended up spending my attention. Your fellow Reapers are classmates before they are anything else, and the mentors above you have the useful quality of being wrong about things. The central thread pulls at who you were before you died, including a love you have to reconstruct in pieces, and the game is smart enough to keep that reveal tangled up in the daily business of learning to reap. That is the trick a lot of afterlife stories miss. Death is the setting, not the subject. What I wanted more of was consequence. Befriending people is pleasant, and the bonds you build shade the back half, but I never felt the floor drop out from a single choice the way the best RPGs in this space manage. Read it as a well-told, largely linear arc with real warmth around the edges rather than a branching machine, and you will not be let down. The caveats are the ordinary ones for a small game in its first week. Steam sentiment sits comfortably in positive territory off a review count you could seat in one lecture hall, which means the consensus is genuine but thin, and the sort of rough edges that only surface when thousands of people hammer a thing have not all surfaced yet. It is PC only, with no console version announced. Build variety is not the draw either. If you came looking for a forty-hour theorycrafting sandbox with respec anxiety and six viable damage archetypes, this is not that game and does not pretend to be. There are Steam Achievements, cloud saves and family sharing, which is a small mercy for a game you may well want to hand to a friend the moment you finish it. Play it for the Academy. Play it for the specific pleasure of a cast that treats mortality as a job with paperwork, a curriculum and a social calendar. Come for the combat only if you accept that it is a competent, satisfying loop rather than a system you will still be dissecting at hour fifty. Grim Trials is short on ambition in exactly one direction, mechanical depth, and generous in the direction I care about most, which is giving me people worth being dead alongside. Go in for the story, stay for the classmates, and set your expectations for the fighting somewhere between honest work and genuinely good.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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