GRUNND

My first few minutes in Bytown felt like arriving at a party where everyone already knows a secret about you. GRUNND drops you into a remote, half-lit town after your unnamed protagonist sleeps through his train stop, and the place immediately communicates one very clear message: you are not welcome, but you are also not going anywhere. That quiet, polite hostility is the game's greatest trick, and SEKTAHOUSE pulls it off with the confidence of a studio that has clearly spent serious time with Franz Kafka and David Lynch. This is largely a one-person operation, and the handcrafted quality of every screen shows it. At its core, GRUNND is a point-and-click adventure grafted onto platformer-inspired side-scrolling locations. You navigate using left-click for movement and right-click to interact, and glowing orbs mark points of interest rather than traditional highlighted hotspots. It is deliberately slow. You physically walk your hero across the map, backtracking between Bytown's locations to combine clues, speak with characters, and use items. A fast travel option eventually opens up, which softens the friction somewhat, but the pacing is unhurried by design. If you need constant forward momentum to stay engaged, this will frustrate you. If you can sit inside a slow-burn world and let it breathe, this is exactly the kind of game that lingers with you. The dialogue system is where GRUNND does something quietly unusual. Your questions, silences, and assumptions during conversations shift the branching story in ways the game never announces. There are no glowing "IMPORTANT CHOICE" prompts. You might not realize you reshaped the narrative until a character responds to something you said three scenes earlier. Multiple endings exist, and replaying to chase them reveals how much the script actually tracks your choices. The cast of voice actors - including a bartender who genuinely steals scenes - sells the surreal tone well. One consistent criticism worth naming: the protagonist himself is unvoiced, which creates an odd asymmetry when every NPC around him speaks with real texture and personality. Visually, GRUNND earns serious attention. Backgrounds are hand-painted in a dark noir style, using stark linework and deliberate shadow to obscure details rather than illuminate them. Character silhouettes are often half-consumed by darkness, which works perfectly for the paranoid atmosphere. One reviewer described it as LIMBO with color added to reinforce the surreal vibe, and that comparison rings true. The soundtrack is sparse and atmospheric, the kind of sound design that rewards headphones in a dark room. Sparse does not mean empty, though. The music shifts texture during the game's stranger encounters in ways that quietly amplify the unease. Where GRUNND earns honest caution: it is a first release, and that shows in places. Some puzzle navigation involves walking long distances when the solution turns out to be wrong, and the multiple endings, while present, arrive somewhat abruptly. The narrative deliberately withholds resolution in a Kafkaesque manner, meaning players hoping for a tidy conclusion will leave unsatisfied. That is an artistic choice, not a flaw in execution, but it is a choice that meaningfully divides its audience. Steam reviews sit in mixed territory, and that split feels accurate. GRUNND is not for everyone. For the right player, the one who reads dialogue carefully, who finds comfort in mystery rather than answers, and who can forgive rough edges on a genuinely ambitious first game, it is a small, strange thing worth experiencing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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