ILooks like it’s going to be a fun vacation. A week spent tending to the absentee landlord’s garden in a remote village in the Netherlands. Birds chirping in the trees, a picturesque church just across the path. But there’s something wrong with designer Tom van den Boogaart’s surreal and quietly creepy puzzle game. All the tools are missing and the villagers are strange and have been warned not to go out at night. Additionally, the sky is a hallucinogenic red and orange haze, and you can sometimes see someone watching you from behind a door or through a window. What the heck is going on?
Grunn is somehow part gardening sim, part point-and-click adventure, and part survival horror thriller. Once you’ve found your scissors and trowel, you can spend your time sorting hedges and digging up molehills, but you can also explore small hamlets and their lonely haunted places. You can often find discarded Polaroid photos that provide photo clues as to where the next tool is. You may find tools and puzzle items. There is a day/night cycle in the background, and as you venture out into the darkness, strange glitches and ghostly beings can be glimpsed at the edge of your vision. As you explore, you will have to fight against dangers that can cost you your life. Then I start all over again, relying only on my memories and photos.
As a result, you feel like you’re trapped inside an Alejandro Jodorowsky movie. Ominous and strange, yet beautiful and compelling. Everywhere you look, there are eerie images, from skeletons lying on riverbanks to strange children sitting alone in bus stops and ferry cafeterias. The puzzles are clever and challenging, and the blocky, discordant visuals make the entire environment feel like the uncanny valley of the mind. If you’re looking for a completely different kind of challenge in a decidedly unnatural open world, Grunn offers more than the gentle rural idyll it was initially promised.
Source: www.theguardian.com
