Play it on: PCCurrent 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 doubtless that this extraordinary assortment of video games by UFO Comfortable, 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. Nonetheless, somewhat than as soon as once more speaking up the gathering as an entire for this week’s entry, I’m going to give attention to the one sport I’ve been taking part in most inside UFO 50 of late: Grimstone, the gathering’s epic JRPG.
In some ways, Grimstone appears like a conventional early JRPG. It’s extra Remaining Fantasy I than Remaining 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 explicit specialty may be. Nonetheless, as these weapons might have indicated, Grimstone does differ from most early JRPGs in a single essential method: it eschews the standard fantasy setting most of them employed for a very terrific “bizarre west” world, one wherein 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 celebration don’t have a lot depth, the world itself does. What at first looks as if a panorama towards 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 current days, although I nonetheless do not 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 great video games whose surfaces I’ve but to essentially scratch. — Carolyn Petit
