Legend of Grimrock

cool game, would like to see more games like it!

A good dungeon crawler
I found the puzzles and combats a little drawn out at times and felt a bit of a grind was needed to solve puzzles and beat monsters at certain points.
Once you know the secrets it is easier, but on the first run you find yourself running out of food and light.
Basically you have to find every key and most secret buttons to progress, there is no moving on without searching everywhere, but it is great fun :-)

A good old school dungeon crawler.

Not a RPG but dancing simulator

Gave me the chills ! Good sound effects, atmospherical graphics, nice puzzles, good game :)
Reminds strongly on Dungeon Master - also some of the interactions in DM were even better (fe.g. falling trap doors can damage enemies) but Grimrock is really nice !

I thought i was ok at these games but this one did me over a number of times as i was prancing round the damn dungeon. Yes you get the hang of side stepping and timing your attacks but still some bits...
If your not following a guide and miss some good stuff, leave stuff as you run out of inventory space, backtrackin when something has clicked how to work out secret earlier etc, it gets quite intense. I'd say don't check up on any guide as long as you can as the lost and scared in the dungeon vibe is a nice one.
And unless your achievement hunting, the gear you come across randomly, learning to sidestep fight and working out afew puzzles for afew items and gear will see you through to the end of the game. I did check the guide myself afew times but limited it as much as poss. Be mindful of which clues are dropped if it comes to that, i lost an useful one =-O
One last thing, i used AHK to rebind the keys, so annoying being a lefty and not being able to rebind the keys to the right side of the keyboard.

It's okay. Maybe something interesting for those really into only rpg-esk games. Just enough to pull me in but not enough to make me stay. Strange game design choice that forces players to scan and scour every nook and cranny just to be able to progress. Just not my cup of tea.

gud game

Fist half is excellent but the second half is filled with so much bs that it ruins the entire game. Hopefully the sequel is better

Haven't played much but enjoying myself so far. The puzzles aren't crazy difficult either. If you feel like playing an old-school dungeon crawler, this one's great.

Dungeon crawler at its finest. Highly recommended.

Super fun and atmospheric. Worth playing

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I got filtered!

I liked the puzzles and exploration, but my the combat became very repetitive and annoying. Maybe my issue here is that I used the default characters preset.
I might give it a second chance in the future, but right now I lost all interest.

I was in the mood for some dungeon crawling and this delivered. something I didn't expect is how much grimrock is a real time action game. It's a lot of fun to explore, solve puzzles, and learn the ins and outs of the combat system

Great dungeon Crawl

I first got into the first-person dungeon crawler experience when I played Stonekeep. I know others had come out before it, but this was the one that intrigued me as a kid. I probably even have the CD somewhere.

Now Legend of Grimrock was a game that piqued my interest around the time it had first come out because it reminded me of Stonekeep. When I first tried it out, I hadn't made it far - maybe two floors - before I moved on. It wasn't because of boredom or lack of interest. It was simply a case of installing something else and never getting back around to it.

Well, I am now pleased to say that is no longer the case.

As I played the game, it brought back all the fond memories of my time on Stonekeep. I did have to change some of the control schemes to mimic that game because even though I had completed it in 2023 I was still expecting certain key presses to behave the same way.

I loved the exploration within the game. At no point did it feel tedious. There were some back-and-forth moments, but never anything that felt dragged out. Most of it was because I finished exploring a section and found a clue or key to get past an area that I had not yet gotten through. So obviously, I would travel to that section to get past it. There were a couple of times when I had to go back to a floor to retrieve an item - for example, I needed three torches to solve a puzzle and unlock a door. I merely went up a floor, grabbed the first three torches from their wall sconce, and viola, I was moving ahead again.

One element that I really liked in Legend of Grimrock but was not present in Stonekeep was the use of lighting and shadows. At the start of the game, you need to carry a torch with you if you want any hope of seeing what's in front of you. Later on, you can find other light sources that end up freeing your hands for other important things. But the light also has another use - to cast shadows. At one point, I was in an area where I was facing a wall. There was an empty space behind me and on the wall, there was a torch. I happened to be reading a note that I had found - and keep in mind, note reading; inventory checking, and map reviewing do NOT pause the game - when a skeleton walked into the space behind me. How did I know? Well, the torch on the wall behind us cast his shadow on the wall in front of me. It was an absolutely brilliant touch!

A game like this also has a ton of secrets which makes exploring even more worthwhile. Now the secrets varied from easy to how in God's name was I meant to figure that out?!

One other feature that I liked, which saved me plenty of headaches, especially during the final fight, was that I could disengage from an enemy and retreat to a safe spot to heal (and save if need be).

I will eventually get around to Legend of Grimrock 2 (which honestly, I don't know how the game has a sequel with the way things ended). Hopefully, it will be just as good, if not better, than its predecessor.

Full Post: https://www.thealphabeticalgamer.com/post/l-is-for-legend-of-grimrock

Lost my save file 13 hours into the game. Might try later. Amazing game.

A nice, simple, throwback dungeon crawler with excellent atmosphere, decent combat, solid but occasionally unintuitive puzzles, good treasure, and fun exploration. The strongest element of the game for me are its secrets - they are hidden everywhere, often require puzzles/careful observation to obtain, and have fantastic rewards. Easily the highlight of my playthrough was obtaining the Dismantler, a secret sword which has an entire floor dedicated to it. Just note that XP is pretty limited, which means you will likely be min-maxing your combat skills on every level up. If you want a mage in your party, fire magic is noticeably stronger than the other elements (at least from my experience) to the point that it will feel like you are handicapping yourself (and your fun) by choosing another school of magic. Also make sure to hold onto every rock you come across; they are often used for the game's puzzles.

Can't recommend this, and I'm almost 50 years old and played Eye of the Beholder when it came out.
It's just an extremely player hostile game, the designers seemed to think "old school" means "obtuse". It's not 1984 anymore, tell me how to play your game and let me fix character mistakes.
I got to level 3, it was a dumb gauntlet of getting attacked by spiders. As an old pro at Eye of the Beholder I knew how to loop them around and slant fights in my favor - then the designers started forcing me to fight them toe-to-toe. My guys would get poisoned and I had to take a trip back to the healing crystal...repeatedly. About the 15th time I was bored and sick of the game. I also found out I had accidently borked my characters, particularly the mage. Lame.
Bummer, I really wanted to like this. Play Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder instead.

Great old school dungeon crawler mixed with real time combat.

Much like what others have said, this is a great old school game. It also brings back why I quit playing these types of games many years ago. I found them very frustrating. And as I'm now older, I find them much more frustrating. However; I still highly recommend this game.

A masterpiece. Check out the LoG2 as well.

"I wonder what's behind this door"
*opens door*
"Is that a giant spide-ACKKKKKKK"

Good ol' tile-based first-person dungeon crawler. I didn't play a lot of it, but what I did was enjoyable.

An absolute gem! Implements very traditional dungeon crawler in a way that it's joy to play even in 2025. A lot of secrets to find and puzzles are mostly fun to solve. Learning to cope with the moving might take some time but it'll come sooner or later. Remember to dance when fighting!

Do it...

If you are a fan of the old dungeon crawler games then this is a must play. The puzzles are decent, the enemies are varied (the furious giant attack snail was funny). There were only a couple of occasions where I needed to cheese the system to kill something.
If you aren't a fan of those old games then there is something new for you to experience here. It is certainly not as frustrating as those games.

Contrary to the developer's belief, you do NOT need 25 poison spiders in one area.

Un classique donjon, dans le style de dungeon master (fin des annees 80).
Juste avec des graphismes modernes.
Mais le style reste tres proche.

Legendary

Ha, it takes you to the past ancient games... just with thousands times better visuals.

Great experience and atmosphere, played on normal and the challenge was good. The boss was lackluster and the spell system was annoying. I end up playing a lot more due to backtracks and the secrets, still missed some things.

This game is digital cr'ack

This game has ruined all other grid based dungeon crawlers for me.

Graphic quality is decent. Music is great. User interface and plot are good.

I would suggest making it so when a character is charging an action, other characters could also attack rather than just be idling. And the grid combat system can be easily exploit because most of the time you are guaranteed to win against an enemy in a 2x2 grid, so I think that aspect could be improved.

I've played this game ages ago, long before i had enough money to buy games on steam. I don't think I've ever finished it back then, but it always lingered in my mind, as an experience i want to go back to. Recently, I sat down and went through it from start to finish, and I have to say, it's a wonderful game, full of secrets to figure out by yourself, rather unique real-time combat, and an unmistakeable, dungeon-crawler atmosphere. Since the days I first played this game, and downloaded it from some sketchy torrents site, I've played a whole lot of table-top RPGs and, frankly, after all these years, I find the traps, and room designs of this game, to be both a golden standard of what you should aim for in gaming, either one played on the table, or on the computer. The exploring aspect is extraordinary, the gameplay loop is satisfying and the last boss is so campy and well-thought-out it just... works perfectly, bringing both a smile and high intensity into the last few minutes of the game. Overall, I think of this game as 9/10, as the locations can become a bit repetitive, and a fuckup may mean a lot of mindless backtracking. Other than that, I can't wait to see the second part of this series, as it seemed like an improvement over an already wonderful game.

I tried playing the OG Eye of the Beholder like a week ago. I started the game only to find out there was no map. "Well, shit. Fine, I'll keep playing for right now and if need be I can bust out the ol' graph paper." Then I got to some stairs and it told me to go to page 6 of the manual and read one of the passages. "ahhh yeah no not today." I didn't feel like alt-tabbing to look at the manual every 2 minutes.

Anyways so yeah this game is basically the same shit except you don't need a manual or graph paper on hand to actually enjoy the game. Anything you have to read is, y'know, in the game, and by default there's an automap. It even has an "oldschool mode" where it takes away the in-game map if you still wanna engage in the self-made maps aspect.

Game's great if you're looking for an oldschool style game. Very puzzle heavy. Ngl, for YEARS I saw screenshots of this game and said "nah this looks like knock-off Dark Souls. I already have all the Dark Souls", but then my friend streamed this for me and I was like "yooooooooo this ain't Dark Souls, this is Eye of the Beholder" and the rest is history

I appreciate that the classes and character races are limited and straightforward in this game. A lot of old RPGs have a TON of class and species options, but then half of them are fucking worthless. This game just kinda streamlines a lot of that aspect by giving you 4 races and 3 classes. Ultimately it probably takes away replay value I'm sure, but, how many times can you really replay a puzzle game anyways?

Good game, very good if you enjoy puzzles.

VERY fun dungeon crawler.

mostly a puzzle game with combat, exploration, and treasure as pacing elements. creates a gameplay loop that works really well. its such a mentally stimulating experience if you can get past the janky combat.

10/10 on level/puzzle design alone.

I played Legend of Grimrock when it came out, but never got past the first couple of levels. I've always said that I'll play through it one day. Over 10 years later, that day has finally come.
Legend of Grimrock is a dungeon-crawling RPG with lots of puzzles. The game has no real story to speak of, but rather a semblance of one. You control a party of convicts that have been imprisoned in a huge tower which no one ever comes out of. The tower is befitting a true dungeon and is filled with all kinds of monsters, traps and puzzles. The real emphasis in Legend of Grimrock is on puzzles and secrets, while combat and RPG elements come secondary.
Speaking of combat, I find it utterly terrible. The combat is in real-time and consist of moving your characters with keyboard while performing actions by mouse. Like in all old-school dungeon crawlers, the map is divided by square spaces and you control your party in first-person view. Most of the time, the combat will resemble you strafing around a monster and hitting it, while it turns hopelessly around in circles trying to follow you. The game is designed so you need to isolate the monsters by kiting, killing them one at a time by using glitches. So yes, terrible combat. On the other hand, the puzzles are pretty well-designed and generally quite rewarding, but their sheer quantity is overwhelming. There is literally a puzzle or a secret at every corner and I was glad to be rid of them by the time I finished the game.
In terms of presentation, Legend of Grimrock looks fairly decent. It also lacks any kind of musical background, so you'll be wandering around in silence. However, this silence adds to the distinct dungeon-crawling atmosphere that is present in the game. All in all, I consider Legend of Grimrock more of a puzzle game than a RPG.

This game has gained legendary status over the years, but I wasn't impressed by it in any way. There are better dungeon crawlers out there, both older and newer.

Score (out of 10):

6.5

Truly the dark souls 2 of grimrock games

HIDDEN GEM!

i was bored so i installed some games i got on sale.
first was bards tale which quickly turned into a healthcare inssurance simulator.
but then i played grimrock and it was much alike but improved in many ways.
im playing on easy becouse i KNOW RPGs start with you oneshotting everyone and then reversing those rolls, and this was no different.
the game has food/light mechanics which are very forgiving, and a dark&darker gear system.
its also very simple which is good, and 70% of the game is puzzles which make you feel smart and arent using moon logic (most of the time).
i learned about both bards tale and grimrock in the song *i want my RPG* from miricle of sound.
and another mention to grimrock in a mandelore gaming video.

i recomend this game if you want to play old video games but are put off by insane mechanic desighn ;)

8 / 10
Enjoyed playing this on Normal Mode. I have been playing the second game, which is definitely better, but I kept stumbling on that game, so I decided to play this all the way through to get the hang of the gameplay better.

GOODS
--- Solid gameplay, once you grasped the controls, how to organise and handle your inventory, and how to make fast gestures with keyboard and mouse, it is very playable.
--- Very good graphics and animations as indie games go from early 2010's. I did muck around with earlier dungeon crawler games like EYE OF THE BEHOLDER which had very shoddy animations, but these GRIMROCK games are a massive technical upgrade.
--- Good variety of enemies.
--- On Normal Mode, it is a fair challenge if you don't save the game often, and you get into some tight situations with multiple enemies.

MIXED FEELINGS
--- Probably just my gameplay experience, but a tactic I kept using is to lure the monsters individually by themselves into small areas so I can circle around them and kill them one by one. That got quite tedious after a while. But once you really geared your party up, you can just go in and slaughter hordes of enemies with a couple of your team dying.

FLAWS
--- Big flaw, but it's just the devs starting out at the time, the boxed in environments are more or less the same. The second GRIMROCK game is a massive improvement on level designs.

I enjoy this game cause its a real time dungeon crawler rather than turn based so it adds extra elements, also the fact that you can't melee from the back for example, its a niche game but very good one! (I have yet to play 2 hope its as good as this one)

true classic

Sufficiently reminiscent of the original Dungeon Master by FTL from back in the 80's to keep me engaged forever!
Can get frustrating in places as you realise you need to think and maybe focus on what the monsters aren't doing rather than on how they keep killing you!
Also handy to know how to go though combinations in grey-code sequence...
Even managing your game saves is critical so you can go back to key moments in the future.
The only awkward thing is that it's possible to get into areas before you have the equipment, notes or skills that you need - so when that happens, retrace your steps and see what you missed, or just get more XP on anywhere that you find spawner areas.
Really challenging and enjoyable!

Accidentally did... Something. Fell into a hole. Landed on an enemy that just happened to be walking underneath. Got an achievement. Fun.

I really want to like Legend of Grimrock. I've reinstalled it and given it another go probably a dozen times, but I never get very far because even though I like puzzle dungeons, I just hate the combat system, which is run away while firing in real time. I guess it's enough for me to not play a game that otherwise seems practically designed with me as the audience.

12 years late but really enjoyed the game! The combat is a little hard to learn at first but once you're used to it it's a good time! The magic is difficult but it kind of made it more charming in a way. Plus if you're like me and usually play games with a guide so you don't miss stuff there's plenty of guides that help you learn the magic. Alternatively you usually find the button combos for spells pretty early. Overall, 10/10! scratches the itch for wanting to play something close to a classic rpg