Grunn Review
Grunn! A game that I showed the boxart in Discord VC one night by accident and made Mirai piss himself asking "what the fuck is a Grunn". (Grunn is Norweigian for "reason" instead of being a foreign word for "Gnome" like I originally had thought).
This game follows a pretty simple premise at first. After arriving by bus early on Saturday morning and solving a simple puzzle, you find yourself at an overgrown and trashed garden with a note from the house's owner. He has hired you as a temporary gardener to take care of his grounds by Monday morning. After that you locate the grass clippers in the shed and begin your work, but very quickly you realize not all is as it seems. Tools are missing, there's a rather ominous note from the previous gardener and all sorts of other odd happenings like a gnome that seemingly whispers while your back is turned and sheds that are much larger on the inside than the outside. I'm not going to spoil much since this is a very new indie game that I want whoever's reading this to play but just know it's incredibly engaging with some silly moments I really enjoyed. The whole town has this dreamy, liminal feel to it, many objects and even the people use flat colors on their polygonal bodies. Speaking of the townspeople, attempting to speak with them will get you a mumble and "You cannot make out what they say", it's all very good at adding to this slightly uncomfortable atmosphere, really solid stuff.
Gameplay is rather open ended. Once you enter the garden for the first time, a clock will be added to the UI where you're free to do as you please and solve as many (or as few) of the games many polaroids that act as your only hints to the many puzzles of the world of Grunn. It reminds me a lot of the "Escape from X Location" flash games I would play as a kid where it was all about using certain key items in certain locations to work your way out of the area. Now this game has 11 different endings and the cool thing is that since many of its items are single use or breakable, there's a whole variety of solutions to singular puzzles, meaning that if you solve a puzzle with one item on one playthrough, you may have to do something different entirely if you use a different item to solve that puzzle on a second playthrough. I really cannot recommend this game enough, it puts the meaning and heart back into what makes "liminal" stuff so appealing with a tinge of humor to it that makes the whole thing incredibly memorable.