GRIME

Most metroidvanias want to charm you. GRIME wants to unsettle you. Developed by the small studio Clover Bite and released on August 2, 2021 into an already-crowded field of Souls-inspired action games, it had every reason to get lost in the noise. Instead it carved out territory nobody else was standing on: a world built from sculpted stone and living flesh, populated by creatures that look like they were excavated from a nightmare about geology and anatomy at the same time.

You play a newborn vessel with a black hole where its head should be — a premise that sounds like an art-school provocation until it becomes clear the studio has engineered an entire combat system around it. This is not decoration. The black hole is the mechanic. Players crush enemies with mutating living weapons, then absorb their remains by parrying, feeding their essence back into the vessel as upgrades.

Positioned squarely for the Souls-like and metroidvania faithful, GRIME arrived as a mid-budget title punching several weight classes above its studio size. The Definitive Edition — the version most players will buy today — folds in three DLC expansions that meaningfully extend the world with new abilities, bosses, enemies, and lore, rather than the cosmetic padding that “definitive” so often signals. Its Metacritic score of 81 reflects genuine craft rather than launch-window hype.

The comparison points are obvious — Hollow Knight for its exploration, Dark Souls for its combat rhythm, Blasphemous for its willingness to be ugly on purpose. But GRIME earns the right to those comparisons instead of merely borrowing their vocabulary. It has an identity. In this genre, that’s rarer than it should be.

• The Absorb-and-Grow Loop: Parry an enemy at the right moment and the black hole consumes them, converting their essence into upgrade currency. Combat and progression are the same act. There’s no grinding in a corner — every fight is a resource.
• Mutating Living Weapons: The arsenal isn’t steel; it’s flesh that shifts in form and function. Weapon variety translates directly into distinct playstyles, and the build system rewards specialization over dabbling.
• Interconnected, Secret-Dense World: A hand-built metroidvania map with hidden paths, layered zones, and the kind of shortcut-unlocking geography that makes the world feel like a machine slowly learned through play.

The Gameplay Loop

The core idea of GRIME is that it refuses to separate offense from progression. In most Soulslikes, you fight to survive, then spend souls at a bonfire. Here, the parry is the economy. Time the absorption correctly and you don’t just avoid damage — you harvest the enemy in front of you, pulling their essence into your build in real time. It collapses two systems that usually sit in separate menus into a single, tense, moment-to-moment decision.

That does something psychological. It changes how a fight reads. A lesser game trains players to play defensively when low on health; GRIME’s design trains them to lean in, because the absorb window is also the reward window. Risk and reward aren’t balanced against each other — they’re the same button. That’s a design achievement most studios with ten times Clover Bite’s budget never reach.

The build system flows naturally from this. Absorbed essence feeds traits, and traits let players tailor the vessel to their instincts — heavier, tankier, and slower, or lean and parry-dependent. Because the game funnels resources through combat rather than loot drops, a build reflects how it’s actually played, not what the RNG handed out. Investing in the traits that suit a playstyle feels like sculpting the character out of one’s own habits.

The Difficulty Curve

Let’s be honest about the punishment. GRIME is demanding, and it doesn’t apologize. The Souls DNA is real: enemies hit hard, positioning matters, and the game expects players to learn its language through death. For the most part it stays on the right side of the “demanding-but-fair” line — the design makes deaths feel earned, boss patterns are legible once the panic subsides, and the parry timing is tuned to be masterable without being a gift.

But there are difficulty spikes that break the rhythm. Certain encounters and boss checks land with a severity out of step with the surrounding content, and when the curve jumps, it can feel less like a designed test and more like an oversight. This is the most common, and most legitimate, complaint from the player base. It doesn’t sink the experience. It does mean newcomers to the genre should walk in with their expectations calibrated.

Exploration and Pacing

The map is the game’s quiet triumph. Zones interconnect with the satisfying inevitability of a good metroidvania — the moment when a wall passed long ago suddenly reveals itself as a shortcut back to base. Curiosity is rewarded consistently with secrets and hidden paths. The tradeoff is backtracking, which occasionally overstays its welcome, and pacing that sags when the world asks players to re-tread ground without enough new friction to justify the trip. The oversized boss encounters are the punctuation marks that keep the momentum alive — spectacular set pieces that test timing and movement rather than raw reflexes, and among the strongest in the genre.

The art direction is the headline, and it deserves to be. GRIME’s world of anatomical horror, sculpted stone, and living flesh is grotesque in a way that feels authored rather than edgy-for-its-own-sake. Bones become architecture. Muscle becomes landscape. The visual language is coherent from the smallest enemy to the largest boss, and that discipline in committing to its unsettling premise holds the whole production together. This is a small studio out-designing far richer competitors on pure vision.

Performance is where the story splits by platform. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and on capable PC setups the precise combat — which lives and dies on parry timing — should get the frame stability it needs. The Switch is a different story, covered below.

On Steam (PC): This is the intended experience, full stop. Mouse-and-keyboard is serviceable, but a controller is the natural fit for the parry-heavy combat, and PC hardware headroom means the frame rate should hold where it matters. Precise timing requires a stable framerate, and PC is best positioned to deliver it.

On Nintendo Switch (Definitive Edition): The content is all here — every DLC, every boss, the complete package — and it’s well-regarded for what it includes. But the port is frequently criticized for performance problems, and in a game this dependent on split-second parries, performance is not a cosmetic concern. It’s a combat concern. When frames drop during the exact windows the game asks players to read perfectly, the difficulty stops being fair and starts being technical. For anyone choosing where to buy, the Switch should be the last resort, not the first.

GRIME is a genre exercise that justifies its existence. Clover Bite took two of the most imitated frameworks in gaming — the Soulslike and the metroidvania — and found a mechanical idea nobody else had built: combat and progression fused into a single parry. Wrapping it in one of the more striking visual identities of its generation makes the achievement harder to ignore.

It isn’t flawless. The cryptic story will lose players who want narrative clarity, the difficulty occasionally spikes past fair, and the Switch port reportedly betrays the precision the design demands. We rate it a solid but imperfect package — recommend it to the right audience, on the right platform. Buy it on PC, come for the black hole, and stay for a combat loop that reframes the parry button. Just skip the Switch version unless there’s no other choice.