GRUNND

by Aethyna Feb 7, 2023 | 1 Votes | 41 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Investigation , Storytelling , Noir

Platforms:

Publishers:

SEKTAHOUSE GRUNND is a dark and surreal point-and-click adventure that’s set in and around the mysterious and remote town of Bytown. With no way to head back to the city, you’ve decided to find a place to bunk for the night, which is apparently too much to ask for. There are other forces at play here and escaping might not be as easy... Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

GRUNND is a dark and surreal point-and-click adventure that’s set in and around the mysterious and remote town of Bytown. With no way to head back to the city, you’ve decided to find a place to bunk for the night, which is apparently too much to ask for. There are other forces at play here and most “people” you may meet may not actually be people at all…

Plotline

You’ve fallen asleep on the train you always take from work to home. However, this time around, something mysterious happened and you found yourself alighting from the train at its very last stop – in the remote town of Bytown. With no way to get back to the city, you thought you should find a place to rest for the night and start afresh tomorrow morning. However, in this game, this is a lot more complicated than it seems.

GRUNND’s story starts off rather vague, but more will be revealed to you as you progress. The many characters you’ll encounter in the game will also gladly (usually) share what they know about the place, giving you more insight into the weird place you’ve somehow found yourself in as well as the many odd incidences you may stumble upon or discovered.

Gameplay

As a point-and-click adventure, the gameplay in GRUNND is quite simple and straightforward – you control the protagonist, known simply as the Hero, so as to help him make his way through the place in hopes of finally finding a way to escape from the creepily mysterious town. There are plenty for you to click on here and the game helpfully points these interactive points out with white bauble-like circles that expand when you get close.

As with any good story-driven game, GRUNND has tons of characters that you can interact with, whether it is a grumpy bartender or a suicidal man. Some of them are placed there to give you important items that will help you progress the story, while others are there to explain the weird world you happened to have been dropped into. There are also plenty of dialogue choices that you’ll have to choose from, but interestingly enough, the game doesn’t really highlight choices that will put you on an entire different branch of the story, so you could be picking dialogue choices and molding the story based on your decisions quite unwittingly. This is very unlike most narrative (and dialogues-driven) games.

Of course, it’s not just walking about and talking to people; you’ll get to solve some simple (mostly) puzzles and well, “quests” from time to time as well. The game has a journal to help you keep track of revelations you’ve uncovered, but it doesn’t really help much if you’re stuck and have no idea what to do or where to go next.

Due to the fact that there’ll be lots of backtracking, the game helpfully adds in a fast travel option for areas that you’ve discovered, making it easy enough to return to a previous area without having to trudge through several areas that are in between your destination and your current location. That being said, there are plenty of times when you still have to walk part of an area – there’s no fast travelling out of this one! Since your character walks rather slowly, it would have been nice to be able to double click on the ground to make him run.

Considering that you may not be able to complete the entire game in a single sitting, you can always manually save your game in one of the two save slots given. The game also has autosave as backup, in case you forgot to save your game.

As fun as the game was however, it still has some room for improvement. Aside from the glitches, the game could shorten the very noticeable “waiting time” between the end of a dialogue to the appearance of the subsequent dialogue choices.

There are also some issues with the game’s interactive points, the white baubles that you’re supposed to click on. Oftentimes, I find that clicking on the circles did nothing and I had to start randomly clicking the area around the circle to get the game to pop up some observations. There are also times when an interactive point has been exhausted, the white circle still remains there when it should definitely have been removed.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics here are perhaps one of the most attractive parts of the game, at least they are for me. Even at first glance, you can already feel the mostly dark and brooding atmosphere that is quite prevalent throughout the game, thanks to the colors and hues used here.

The selection of background music used here matches perfectly with the dreary and sometimes creepy mood. The game is also filled with some quality voice acting, whether it is the many characters you talk to or even the narrator himself. However, the protagonist isn’t voiced in this game, which makes conversations a bit weird sometimes.

Conclusion

GRUNND is a point-and-click adventure that doesn’t overstay its welcome, offering a rather surreal and somber experience as you make your way around the island and the town, talking to various strange characters and solving puzzles, all done in hopes of getting a place to stay for the night and finding a way to escape this weird location. The story remains cryptic throughout the game, leaving you with plenty of room to speculate and essentially fill in the gaps based on what you’ve learned about the place and the people in it.

Yes, the game still has some issues as pointed out above which would likely be fixed in subsequent patches, but if you’re in the market for a point-and-click game with a bizarre and slightly Kafkaesque theme, GRUNND is one game you’ll want to play!