Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar

This is a review I wrote some time ago that I never published anywhere and found sitting on my hard drive this morning. I’ve always been fascinated by American and European made computer RPG’s, and they are at least D&D adjacent. Japanese RPG’s I am also fond of, but they don’t give me the same overall feeling of a pen and paper experience translated to the screen. I used to write for various different game sites, but as that medium started to decline to a state of keyword and bullshit SEO requirements and my work became less and less my own, I grew disenchanted with the process. My personal brand of zen anarchy wouldn’t allow it, but now and then I still like to write about video games.

Reviewing Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar is maybe one of the most difficult reviews I've had to put to paper. I wouldn't even call it a review infact – there is so much to take in and talk about, it's really more of a fascination and an overview of Grimoire and the 20 year history behind it.

We can't talk about Grimoire without talking about Wizardry. Wizardry was the premiere series from Sir-Tech, one of the most influential RPG series of all time right next to Ultima. Wizardry is both a product of its time, and a product of a very different set of Dungeons & Dragons rules than what we know today. Recently a remake of the first game was developed by Digital Eclipse – also a great game worth checking out – and a new generation is now getting the opportunity to play this classic gem of permadeath, total party kills, and intense, claustrophobic dungeon crawling.

Games such as Wizardry and Grimoire are referred too as “blobbers”, because your party is a sort of amorphous “blob” of members that you are controlling simultaneously and giving orders too. They typically take place in a first person perspective, introduced by Wizardry, and have you navigating a world typically in turn based fashion, tile by tile on a grid. While the original Wizardry had one primary dungeon you were exploring, later games in the series and genre would open things up a lot more, introducing fleshed out worlds with towns and overworld map to explore. Wizardry 7 is the primary example of this in the series, with Wizardry 8 following suit, along with games like Might and Magic and Bard's Tale. Grimoire follows this same formula, with hundreds of maps to explore, from multi-level dungeons to large surface areas and towns.

The interesting thing to note here as that nowhere is safe. Infact, the first town of Grimoire is incredibly hostile to new players, with difficult early level encounters in town that can make it difficult to even get to the first shop safely. The cool thing about Grimoire is that you have an ability to start the game from multiple locations, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The “uncool” thing about Grimoire is that a challenge awaits you no matter where you start, and rolling a decent party before venturing into the world is a must – the quick play option is going to set you up for failure out of the gate for the most part.

But before diving into the game, lets talk about how and why it was made.

The conception of Grimoire began in the mid 90's when creator Cleveland Blakemore was hired by Sir-Tech as a “cracker jack coder” to save their rapidly failing Australian attempt at producing Wizardry 8. In the end the project ultimately failed, and Cleveland resigned from the project. A lot of this information first came to light in the RPG Codex forums where Cleveland made a lot of claims about Wizardry 8 being developed by some strange and unsavory people, containing a lot of odd design choices that were sexual in nature, such as monsters modeled after penises, Furry characters engaged in sex acts, and other bizarre claims.

At the time, no one really listened to Cleveland. He has quite an interesting reputation himself, and it is difficult to tell if he is playing a character online in an elaborate troll on these communities, or if he is genuine in the things he is saying. He tends to speak sarcastically and with hyperbole. He believes he is descended directly from neanderthals, and considers himself a different species to other human beings, who are derived from homo-sapiens. He moved his family out to Australia and built a fallout shelter, and ran a blog covering this and his own operating system that was meant to be implemented in the case of a nuclear holocaust, all inspired aesthetically by the Fallout series. He is deeply defensive of Grimoire and allegedly threatened lawsuits against people who criticized it, and was very active in the time of its release, commenting on many criticisms in a not-so-friendly manner. And it could be fairly assessed that Grimoire itself was done partly out of spite to the souring of his relationship with Sir-Tech as well, but ultimately there is no denying this was more an elaborate passion project by a developer who was trying to make the best possible game in the genre – albeit one that would look and feel insanely out of date by the time it was eventually released in 2017.

A lot of the things Cleve was saying which were discounted were eventually shown to have evidence, with documents unearthed that proved the existence of penis monsters and furries. Other claims Cleveland made included one of the developers in Australia being a pedophile harbouring teenage runaways. Those claims are more difficult to verify and will probably never come to light in a way Cleve would like to see, but despite the general disinterest in Cleve's stories, often undermined by his own hyperbole, it did turn out that what Cleve was saying was at least partially true.

So we have a developer that ended up starting a project in the late nineties, running an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign for it in 2013, and finally, releasing it in 2017, with a proper manual to follow several years later. Even in the game itself, Cleve is willing to poke fun at this, with Easter eggs pointing out his tendency to procrastinate. If nothing else, despite how outlandish he appears on the surface, there seems to be a level of self-awareness there, and Cleve is friendly and reasonable to people who just want to talk to him about his game.

So as for the game itself – what is Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar?

For people not familiar or comfortable with the genre or its roots in the 80's and 90's, an absolute nightmare.

Grimoire doesn't hold your hand in any sense. It's UI is ancient by 2017 standards, and maybe even by 1997 standards. It has a litany of choices to be made. It has massive amounts of stats, and spells, and skills, and classes and races. It's difficult to know where to even begin when playing Grimoire, but plenty of online guides and the eventual release of the manual has helped many players along in their adventure. Gameplay takes place in a tiny window in the middle of the screen with the rest of the screen bursting with UI elements bordering it. It allows you to go into the game with a whopping eight characters, and more NPC's are recruitable along the way. It's open ended to the point of being confusing to anyone who has not already familiarized themselves with the genre, and in my first ten minutes of playing, I wanted to quit. I experienced a total party kill in the very first encounter I had and was immediately turned off. I shut down the game never to return.

Except, I did return, about twenty minutes later. I perused the documentation and guides, and created a brand new party from scratch. That party started in a different starting zone, and died about twenty minutes in - a slight improvement from the prior attempt. Invigorated that I was at least able to fight my way through a couple of battles, I went back to the drawing board YET AGAIN and spent a lot more time in the Library creating a party.

Now I had what I believed to be a sufficiently equipped party. Some things were still difficult. I instantly gave up and began save scumming, since none of my attacks were hitting, unable to penetrate the armor of the enemies in the first town. My spells would fail consistently. But I did find a gauntlet that fired energy bolts that helped through the early stages.

I was able to navigate the town and find an item shop. I learned that the starting inventory was effectively garbage, probably because my skill level with those particular weapons was abysmal. So I immediately spend some well earned cash buying bladed weapons for my party, which helped to get through some of the nastier fights. In battle you need to choose HOW you are going to attack, whether that's bashing, stabbing, or slashing, and I found this would make a difference in combat as well. In particular were some well armored beetle creatures that I couldn't seem to touch. But after gaining some levels and skill points, and choosing to change my attack style, I started cutting through these enemies like butter.

Grimoire has an interesting fatigue element called Vitality. Vitality goes down as you commit yourself to actions in combat, and has to be restored through magic or resting. When you rest, your characters age, and eventually they can age so much that they effectively have to be retired. And you also need to find safe spots to rest with the Scouting ability. Some other quirks are spells like Identify. You don't just cast Identify and select the item – you cast Identify and then have to use the Assay skill to identify the item. There are secrets EVERYWHERE in Grimoire, so you have to use your party to Look, and you also need to cast spells to search for secrets.

The addicting thing in Grimoire for me is building skills. The more you do something, the more points you gain in it. When your characters level up, they will get a set amount of new points in skills and attributes, and usually new spells if they are casters, but you will also be given extra points sometimes to assign to attributes, and skill points to build up your skills. This is a game where skills are VERY important. You need to build up skills for innumerable things, and not doing so can stall progress. Gaining levels early goes fairly smoothly, but as you progress, this becomes more and more difficult and takes a lot more time to do. Casters can be eliminated by a gust of wind early on, and so you will be relying on a group of fighting class characters to survive and tank some of the tougher enemies.

I am becoming comfortable with the UI but there are some quirks there for sure. There is a shared inventory that is fairly clunky and has to be managed with some discrimination. There are lots of little hidden elements that are not apparent. You will have to spend time reading about Grimoire in order to effectively play Grimoire and understand its possibilities.

Beyond that, the art can be a mixed bag, but is certainly evocative of Wizardry 7. I quite like the music in the game, though it is presented entirely in MIDI. Some of the sound effects are grating and outstay their welcome, like skittering and singing sounds from enemies that drone on and on during battles. This is a game out of time in many ways, but I found that it had a particular fascinating charm for this reason.

After about four hours I was becoming very comfortable with the game. I built my party up to about level 5, and began to feel like I was bridging the gap between a very uncomfortable and difficult start, to a much more familiar, decently balanced experience. I can't speak for the rest of the game, but what I have found in Grimoire is a fun, addicting RPG with an absolute boatload of options. And despite a very rocky initial release, I have not experienced any bugs or issues.

Do I recommend Grimoire? That's a lot more difficult to say.

I think as an introduction to this genre, the Wizardry remake would be a much better place to start. A modern UI, modern graphics and sound go a long way to breaking the barrier of entry here. It's still obscure enough to contain some mystery and fascination and surprises, but is simply much less alienating to grok.

For veterans of the genre, we aren't seeing a huge influx of these games anymore. Probably the bulk of them are coming out of Japan, but they are eschewing the western D&D style for more of an anime aesthetic, which isn't always appealing to everyone. That said, they have some fantastic Wizardry entries of their own that also go back to the roots of the first game, and are perfect if you both enjoy blobbers and that anime look. But I think for anyone who already likes those games, despite it being pretty arcane, Grimoire is a good choice. It is priced far more cheaply than on release, has a plethora of guides available for it now, so it is certainly in far better shape than it was in 2017.

I think it's a fascination. An oblique, strange, massive entry to the genre that will provide endless hours of gameplay for anyone willing to explore its intricacies. I am really enjoying my time with it, in the same way a masochist gets off by being whipped. It's cruel and punishing but really starts to ease up after you get through it's relatively cruel and merciless first few areas.