This series is intended to highlight some of the free games that I enjoy and would recommend. Specifically, the focus will be on games that are permanently free (not free-to-play with microtransactions and not temporarily free) and that are available through the likes of Steam, Itch.io, GOG, or Epic Games. Any recommendations of such games are welcome as well!

Game: Grimm’s Hollow

Platform: Steam, Itch.io

Release Date: October 31, 2019

Developer: Ghosthunter

Genre: RPG

Length: ~ 2 hours

Trailer:

Grimm’s Hollow is a bite-sized turn-based RPG made in RPG Maker 2003 and released in late 2019. The game follows Lavender, a teen girl who wakes up to find herself in a strange dormitory surrounded by cloaked figures in skull masks, where it is revealed that she is dead. Rather than move on to the afterlife, though, her spirit is stuck in a sort of limbo place called Grimm’s Hollow that is run by the kindly being known, naturally, as Grimm. There are two types of spirits in Grimm’s Hollow – ‘Reapers’, who like Lavender lack enough Spirit Energy to journey through to the afterlife, and ‘Ghosts’, who have too much energy to move on and frequently become hostile and dangerous. Reapers are tasked with harvesting the Spirit Energy from Ghosts, the idea being that doing so will help both the Reapers and Ghosts ultimately leave the Hollow. Lavender is initially resistant at the thought of taking part in this whole process, but upon receiving rumors that her brother Timmy is also in Grimm’s Hollow and has become a Ghost she decides she must do whatever it takes to find him before another Reaper does.

From a gameplay perspective, Grimm’s Hollow focuses much more on combat and exploration than on puzzle-solving. Despite the game’s diminutive size, the developer managed to stuff three dungeons into it. As expected, none of them are particularly long by RPG standards, but they are nicely compact mazes. Although each dungeon has its own (spoiler-y) objective, all three of them require Lavender to fight her way through various types of Ghosts and collect Spirit Energy along the way. That Energy can then be used to progress Lavender’s skill tree, which is surprisingly full of options for such a short game. Outside of the dungeons, the overworld is mainly for talking to NPCs and buying goodies from the Baker.

An RPG lives or dies based on its battle system, and the battle system of Grimm’s Hollow does a very good job of walking the tightrope between simplicity and complexity. It manages to combine multiple different elements that, while not new to the genre, together help to give the game its own quirky identity. For one thing, the game makes use of an Active Time Battle (ATB) system, a style of battle apparently popularized by some of the early Final Fantasy games. Essentially, Lavender and each enemy have their own time meters. Whenever one of them attacks, their meter is emptied and they have to wait for it to refill before they can attack again. Because each meter refills at a different rate due to differing stats, you can have situations where one side can attack twice before the other can respond. It’s an interesting system – one I hadn’t ever encountered before – that adds another layer of strategy to each fight.

As with games like Paper Mario and (from what I’ve gathered) Undertale, successfully pulling off an attack or evading an enemy attack also requires you to complete a quick mini-game of sorts. Additionally, Lavender has a ‘Special Points’ bar that starts out each battle empty but can be filled by attacking Ghosts or consuming certain baked goods. These accumulated Special Points can then be used to perform more powerful or more specialized Special Moves, which can be unlocked by progressing in the aforementioned skill tree. While none of these components are particularly complex on their own, they do provide enough variety to keep the battles from feeling stale over the course of the game. By the same token, the relative simplicity of the battle system makes it pretty quick to grasp – something that is important when a game is only two hours long.

Where the game perhaps shines the most, though, is in the aesthetics and the story. It really is just a pleasant and soothing game to look at. Graphically it isn’t much different from any other RPG Maker game, but the character designs and sprites are very charming. I particularly like how Grimm is portrayed as kind of a poofy black cloud with a skull, something to set him apart from the stereotypical Grim Reaper design. The heavy use of pastel colors, and purple in particular, contribute to an often chill atmosphere, especially when combined with Natbird and Bruno Buglisi’s excellent soundtrack:

At the same time, there’s something almost melancholic about how monochromatically purple the Hollow is and about the dark, cloud-filled sky beneath the realm that feeds into a feeling of loneliness, of wrongness and isolation. It helps to contribute to the game’s strong emotional core, which in turn gives added weight to the story. It really is pretty remarkable how well Grimm’s Hollow is able to flesh out its character arcs and provide a largely satisfying plot in two hours or less. While I would gladly have spent hours more in this world and with these characters, the game doesn’t need it to tell the story it wants to tell.

All-in-all, Grimm’s Hollow is a game that impressed me quite a bit. There were a few small glitches here and there, mostly visual (such as enemy sprites being duplicated in battle) and none that impacted gameplay, but otherwise it is well polished with an interesting battle system, charming aesthetics, and an engrossing story.

Images courtesy of the game’s Steam and Itch.io pages