Picture in your mind a dark corridor with dreadful shadows cast all around you. A flickering torch is your only light source as you and your companions trudge along cautiously, searching the chipped cobblestones for a secret lever, door, or trap hole. The whole room is cramped, the sheen of dust along the dungeon floor is thick and choking, and in the distance you hear the rumblings of something sinister in the darkness….

The above is perhaps the best way to describe what it is like when playing a dungeon crawler. This sub-genre of roleplaying games is perhaps amongst the most famous of sub-genres in the gaming industry, dominating the PC market in the 1980s. From the Wizardry series to Eye of the Beholder, from Might and Magic to The Black Onyx, the rich history of the genre is as old as gaming itself, but at the same time just as antiquated.

Sadly, the dungeon crawler is no longer in vogue in the gaming industry; every so often we see a throwback or two, but for the most part, the genre has been relatively dormant and forgotten. But for the development team of Almost Human and their first official release, Legend of Grimrock, the future is looking bright for a renaissance in the old-school style.

Almost Human is comprised of a group of developers who have worked on some big name titles in the past, including Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake. Deciding to go a different direction, Almost Human focused their efforts on a strong indie title with old school leanings; as a quartet of prisoners, your goal in Legend of Grimrock is simple; escape and survive the dungeon and win freedom back the hard way.

The game has you create a party of prisoners, each of them falling into the primary archetypes of a warrior, mage, or rogue. You also have four races to choose from, with the humans being the jack of all trades race, while the other three are competent in a specific class. A lot of the character customization is really good here, putting your base stats for your character up, and then leveling up proficiencies as you go. Want a warrior who likes using axes in combat? Pump points into his axe stat. Want a thief who throws daggers and grenades? Put points into his throwing stats. How about a fire mage with staff skill? Points galore in fire magic and staff proficiency.

Of course, if you wish you can skip the creation process and go through the dungeons with a pre-determined party, but the beauty of role-playing like this is to strike the right balance of character classes to survive the dungeon’s deadly denizens. It is nice to see that the choices of the player are also not instantaneous. Using spells, for example, requires you to level up a specific type of magic and finding a scroll to unlock the spell, making your mage characters powerful over time, instead of being equipped with spells at level one. Other passive benefits are also gained as you level up, including +5 to your health or mana points, +25 frost resistance, and so forth. And since you only get 4 points per level gain, distributing them to a characters skillset is a crucial skill to master.

The core of the experience involved in Legend of Grimrock is seen in a first-person perspective on a grid-based system. You traverse the corridors of the dungeon and use whatever weapons or tools you find as your only defense against the numerous monsters and traps that litter the world. Because everything is grid-based and in real time, there is a fair amount of action that can occur on-screen by enemies attacking on all sides, making Legend of Grimrock a fast paced, yet strategic affair.

The game also has a great emphasis on exploration and puzzles, which I really liked. Some of the puzzles were very simple, like finding hidden switches and figuring out a riddle or two. Others required a lot of time and effort to succeed in. Most of the puzzles involved hidden switches, levers, torches, and pressure plates, and some even required you to take a leap of faith and fall into a trap door. Now that is commitment….

That said, there is one type of puzzle that grated on me during Legend of Grimrock, and that would be the reflex puzzles. I fully admit to being a bit slow on a keyboard and mouse, but some puzzles involve you to be precise and perfect with things like aiming and running to continue going forward. Some of them were real easy, while others required you to do several things in sequence to continue the game. Maybe it’s just me, but I found that to be very annoying and kind of cheap at times, especially after sixteen tries at the same solution. Thankfully, these obtuse obstructions were few and far between though.

In truth, I’m just thankful that puzzles exist in the game. It is rare to see an RPG utilize your wits as much as your skills at party building while playing a game. In fact, solving the puzzles leads to greater rewards, new equipment, experience, and even buried treasure that you can find in the dark halls of Grimrock. Who knows where some of the few dozen missed secret rooms were during the whole adventure, and if anything it gives me incentive to play it again to find out!

That said, Legend of Grimrock is a rather short experience for a dungeon crawler. I was able to beat the game, and find a majority of its treasures, in under 14 hours. There are also rather frustrating spikes of difficulty to it. Certain monsters, for example, will leave a party decimated after a long sequence of puzzles or previous encounters right before a big battle, making the game cross a few times into the Dark Souls territory of pure unfairness.

Sadly, one of the problems with Legend of Grimrock right now is that the entire adventure is a linear one, meaning you will always find the fire spell past the same locked door, you will always have to fight a skeleton centurion behind a hidden wall, and you will always have the same secrets and hideaways to contend with after the game is finished. There is little variety other than finding missing secret rooms or using new tactics to fight a monster. Almost Human has pledged to release new dungeon maps as extended content though, promising even more races and customizable options through subsequent releases as well, including Mac and iOS support in the near future.

One of the nicer touches Almost Human put into Legend of Grimrock is their slick aesthetic design. From the static artwork and portrait designs, to the some beautiful still shots acting as cut-scenes. The game just looks the part of a dungeon crawler, with a wholly modern twist by using updated graphics and dynamic lighting. Legend of Grimrock also has really good sound design. While the music in game is very limited, the sound effects actually enhance the dungeon crawling experience; hearing shuffling in the dark and the creaking of doors opening gives the game a rich atmosphere that would otherwise be lost. It is the kind of sound effects that survival horror titles use to give the game ambiance, and it works just as well in representing the unknown here.

For $15.00, and being DRM free, Legend of Grimrock is a nostalgic throwback and Almost Human should get credit for the job well done in recapturing the magic of the 1980s. That said, the game may not be for everyone. The slower pace and emphasis on puzzle solving may actually turn off a few players from the experience, so it may be worth looking at videos or a possible demo before you buy the product. But rest assured, this is one dungeon that is worth traversing in the end, even if it is a one time adventure.

The game was played on the PC over Steam for a total of fifteen hours. A code was provided by the game’s developer for review.