YoSounds like a lovely getaway. A week in a remote Dutch village tending an absentee owner’s garden; birds chirping in the trees, a quaint church just across the road. But something is wrong in designer Tom van den Boogaart’s surreal and quietly disturbing puzzle game. All the tools are missing, the villagers are strange and they have warned you not to go out at night. Plus, the sky is a hallucinogenic haze of red and orange and every once in a while you catch someone staring at you from behind a door or through a window. What the hell is happening?
Grunn is somehow part gardening simulator, part point-and-click adventure, and part survival horror thriller. Once you find your scissors and trowel, you can spend time tidying up hedges and digging mole hills, but you can also explore the small village and its lonely, haunted places, often finding discarded Polaroid photographs that will give you photographic clues as to where There is the following tool. An implement or a puzzle item can be found. There’s a day-night cycle running in the background, and if you venture into the darkness, strange glitches and ghostly beings glimpse at the edges of your vision. As you explore, you will have to face dangers that could end up killing you; Then, you’ll start over from scratch with only your memories and photos as a guide.
The result is like being trapped in an Alejandro Jodorowsky film: sinister, strange but beautiful and compelling. Everywhere you look there is some disturbing image, from skeletons lying on river banks to strange children sitting alone at bus stops and ferry canteens. The puzzles are clever and challenging, and the jarring blocky visuals make the entire environment feel like some kind of uncanny valley of the mind. If you’re looking for a very different kind of challenge, in a decidedly unnatural open world, Grunn offers much, much more than the quiet rural idyll it initially promises.