Play it on: PC
Present objective: Uncover the reality on the coronary heart of the world
For the previous few weeks, I’ve been singing the praises of UFO 50 right here within the pages of the Weekend Information, and certainly, it appears possible that this extraordinary assortment of video games by UFO Gentle, a developer of the Nineteen Eighties that by no means truly existed, will dominate my gaming time as soon as once more this Saturday and Sunday. Nonetheless, relatively than as soon as once more speaking up the gathering as a complete for this week’s entry, I’m going to give attention to the one recreation I’ve been taking part in most inside UFO 50 of late: Grimstone, the gathering’s epic JRPG.
In some ways, Grimstone looks like a standard early JRPG. It’s extra Ultimate Fantasy I than Ultimate Fantasy IV or VI, with its blank-slate characters who by no means converse or have any persona past what you may glean from their expressive sprites and their pure tendencies towards sharpshootin’, shotgunnin’, or no matter their explicit specialty may be. Nonetheless, as these weapons might have indicated, Grimstone does differ from most early JRPGs in a single essential means: it eschews the normal fantasy setting most of them employed for a extremely terrific “bizarre west” world, one through which gunslingers and ghost cities coexist alongside angels, demons, and all method of unusual and unsettling creatures and happenings. And even when the characters in your occasion don’t have a lot depth, the world itself does. What at first looks like a panorama in opposition to which a simplistic battle of excellent and evil is taking part in out reveals itself to be extra complicated and intriguing as you persist by means of Grimstone’s surprisingly prolonged quest.
I believe I’m lastly nearing the tip of that quest after taking part in Grimstone fairly obsessively in latest days, although I nonetheless don’t know fairly what I’ll discover on the finish of the mysterious late-game dungeon that now awaits me. One factor I do know, nevertheless, is that it doesn’t matter what I discover, ending Grimstone will hardly mark the tip of my time with UFO 50, because it nonetheless has so many fantastic video games whose surfaces I’ve but to actually scratch. — Carolyn Petit
