For this months Blaugust Reviews Humble Choice I took on the task of playing GRIME, a souls-like, metroidvania developed by Clover Bite. I played GRIME for just over two and a half hours which, honestly, was about an hour and a half longer than I thought I’d spend on it. I don’t typically last long with games in this genre. They tend to end up uninstalled out of frustration.

Now everyone get out their souls-like bingo cards and let’s see what we’ve got here:

• A currency gained from killing monsters that you’ll use to level up and buy weapons that is called something but you’ll only ever refer to them as souls…Check
• A level up system that requires increasingly more souls for every stat increase…Check
• Weapons that scale with your stats based on the letters….Check
• Enemies that respawn every time you reach a checkpoint or die…Check
• A green stamina bar that depletes far too quickly with every attack or dodge action…Check
• A barely coherent story set in a dark world that you’ll either find incredibly interesting or ignore completely….Check
• Losing all of your souls when you die…No, actually. That’s odd.

There are a few things that make GRIME stand out from your average souls-like game. The first is that last bullet point, you don’t lose your souls when you die. This is a wild departure from all of the other various souls-like or souls inspired games I’ve played over the years. Some would say it’s a core mechanic of the genre. How can you be a souls-like if you’re not punishing the player at every turn?

Instead, you lose a currency called Adore, which you gain from killing monsters as well. This is a multiplier of sorts that determines how many souls you get per kill except for bosses. This feels way less punishing if you die before getting back to your body. But don’t worry, GRIME has replaced this inconvenience with a limited healing ability. So while your not going to lose your souls you are going to die a lot more without a handful of healing flasks to cover your mistakes!

This brings us to GRIME’s other interesting mechanics: absorbing enemies. You see, whatever it is that your playing has appears to have a black hole for a head, which is cool, and also useful. Your able to absorb enemies by countering an attack right as they hit you. On the small enemies this will usually kill them outright and on the big enemies it will take a chunk of their health out. It also has the added benefit of filling your healing ability back up after about 4 absorptions.

When you absorb a new type of enemy a few times passive abilities are unlocked which can help you steer your build towards a particular play style. The passive abilities are unlocked with Hunt Points which are obtained from killing large prey. These are bigger than your average enemy but not quite a boss and don’t respawn when you reach a check point or die.

Overall, GRIME is a solid game. I don’t typically like hard games but there was something compelling about the gameplay and exploration that kept pushing me to play a little bit more. GRIME isn’t easier than other souls-like metroidvania’s that I’ve played in the past but it feels less punishing. It plays at a slower pace and when I died I always felt like I knew why. Mostly because I’m wasn’t patient enough. I enjoyed my time with it and if I wasn’t actively playing other games I might have dove in to this one further.

So is GRIME worth buying June’s Humble Choice for? Well if you like this sort of thing then there’s enough of an interesting take here to try it out. It also just had an update which adds a new new game + mode so there’s a decent amount of content to get in to. I wouldn’t buy the this month’s Choice specifically for it but it’s a welcome addition to the other games.