14 DAY TRIAL // Modern video games have made us soft, weak players who expect the mechanics of the real world to be quickly and simply replicated in our virtual experiences, allowing us to use the same kind of thinking that enables us to move around when it comes to the physical space.
Legend of Grimrock is a game that actually taunts you about your habits and turns them against you repeatedly.
Movement takes place on a square grid and there’s no diagonal movement at all, which means that quickly escaping from a fight with more than one enemy is impossible, although I find myself trying to do it repeatedly.
You cannot actually turn around using the mouse, although you can use it to look at the world, which means that looking at a room while also dodging an enemy attack can only be accomplished by doing a complex dance using Q,A,W,S, E and D on the keyboard.
I bumped into walls more often than I care to remember in the first two hours of Legend of Grimrock and even after playing for two hours continuously I found that I constantly tripped over my own fingers when fighting tough enemies.
But, even as I was feeling a little frustrated, I was entertained by the control scheme and my own fumbles.
After all I was controlling a party of four heroes that moved as one and were exploring a dark and threatening dungeon after being literally thrown down by the guard of the king.
It was actually natural to stumble around and make mistakes, it was normal to step into a wall in the darkness and to try to move backwards to flee from an enemy only to find that the adventurers you controlled were trapped in a dead end.
Legend of Grimrock makes no apology for its old school gameplay and that’s a big part of its charm.