Play it on: PC
Present aim: 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 probably that this extraordinary assortment of video games by UFO Delicate, a developer of the Eighties that by no means really existed, will dominate my gaming time as soon as once more this Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, reasonably than as soon as once more speaking up the gathering as an entire for this week’s entry, I’m going to concentrate on the one sport I’ve been enjoying 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 communicate or have any persona past what you’ll be able to glean from their expressive sprites and their pure tendencies towards sharpshootin’, shotgunnin’, or no matter their specific specialty is perhaps. Nevertheless, as these weapons might have indicated, Grimstone does differ from most early JRPGs in a single essential method: it eschews the normal fantasy setting most of them employed for a extremely terrific “bizarre west” world, one by 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 social gathering 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 fine and evil is enjoying out reveals itself to be extra advanced and intriguing as you persist via Grimstone’s surprisingly prolonged quest.
I believe I’m lastly nearing the tip of that quest after enjoying 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, nonetheless, 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 essentially scratch. — Carolyn Petit