Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Forsaken Bride is the first game in the Grim Legends series by Artifex Mundi, first releasing on PC in 2014, ported to Xbox One in 2016, then to PlayStation 4 in 2017, then Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game puts players in the role of a young woman traveling to a rural town to attend her twin sister’s wedding, which is surrounded my mysterious circumstances already before being disrupted when a bear attacks the town and kidnaps the bride-to-be.

I’ll say now that I found the storytelling here to be particularly ham-fisted and awkward, with wooden and unnatural voice acting and a tone that’s surreal in how melodramatic it can get without ever feeling like the stakes are high or the urgency is pressing. This is not a game to be played for its story.

The rest of the presentation is a bit odd too. This game uses detailed 2D visuals that pop with color, and all of this should be a good thing. The problem is that the ugly character designs seem to have an uncanny valley thing going on, which is only made worse by the unnatural paper doll animation style. This is joined by pre-rendered cutscenes and other pre-rendered elements that definitely show their age.

Despite all the way the presentation fails here, the gameplay works well enough. The puzzles do occasionally dip into the nonsensical, and it’s bizarre how often you have to do some sort of “slot the pieces into the right positions” puzzle without characters commenting on how strange it is that this happens so much. However, the game does a decent job giving players indications of what they need to do next, and there’s a handy help feature that should keep players from getting stuck too often, while being limited in the frequency of its use often enough that it should push players to try to think things through before falling back on that as an easy out.

That said, it is still missing a few features. There’s no hotspot indicator to show what can be interacted with, and there are no touchscreen controls in handheld mode. I think the standard gamepad controls work well enough here, but it would have been nice to have the option.

Overall, I think Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride is a decent enough Graphic Adventure, though it’s hardly an exemplary entry in that genre. Players on Nintendo Switch have tons of better options than this. However, you could do far worse if you’re looking for a Graphic Adventure to pass some time.

tl;dr – The Forsaken Bride is the first game in the Grim Legends series of Graphic Adventures, and its odd tone and uneven presentation and somewhat made up for with decent gameplay, but even then there are still shortcomings here. You have far better alternatives than this on Nintendo Switch, but there are certainly far worse games as well.

Grade: C

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