“Prove your worth. Hack and blast your way through the Grim Trials. Explore the (after)life of the Academy – a training ground for aspiring Grim Reapers. Befriend fellow Reapers, learn from your mentors, and uncover the secrets of your life and love before your death.” – Steam Description

Grim Trials is an action roguelike similar to games like Hades or Warm Snow. At its core level you have a normal attack, a heavy attack, a ranged option, and a dash. That’s all pretty standard in this genre of game but Grim Trials does a couple things to set itself apart from the others. In Grim Trials you have gear, gear sets, talent points, consumable buffs, and ways to influence your build throughout your run.

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Knock, Knock, Knockin’

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You start the game, well, dead. Not a great place to start out in a normal game but in this one, where you are learning to become a Grim Reaper, probably the best place to start. You are thrown into a run with no preamble and when you inevitably kick the bucket you are sent to the academy. Upon arrival to the Academy, you meet John. John acts as your guide through your new life. His quests are revolving around fighting each of the Deadly Sins, which is the Main Story Questline. From this hub you can also meet the 3 crafting NPCs, 1 combat NPC, and 3 other story only NPCs. Every time you come back from a successful trial, you’ll want to take a lap around the hub to check all of the places you can find NPCs so you can advance their story. The quests the NPCs give do unlock gear sets, give you Soul Runes, access to advanced potions, and just generally improve your gameplay experience. While I’m sure you could just talk to John and run back out to the next trial, I don’t recommend it as you’d be missing out on a lot of really cool features.

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Death Comes For All

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You have 4 trials to complete. Since you are fighting the Seven Deadly Sins, you fight 2 sins each in the first 3 trials and then 1 sin in the final trial. The main quest revolves around purifying your soul of each of the sins, so it’s about facing yourself. Each trial section has a brand new set of enemies to fight and an environmental mechanic to manage. The variety between the enemies and the maps is diverse and a welcome shift in the genre. This follows the same style of something like Binding of Isaac where you do go room to room, however you don’t know what is in the next room. There aren’t challenge rooms or anything like that from something like Hades but there are resource rooms or chest rooms that you can find. You will always find a chest room before a boss though, so you have a vague idea of when you can see a boss. Pay attention to the way your map is being laid out, how the rooms are connected, and you’ll get an idea for when you’re going to fight a boss. At the end of every room, you get an upgrade choice. Each upgrade choice has multiple levels to it and they increase a level every time you choose them. So it should go without saying but the more rooms you can complete before you see the boss fight, the stronger you will be. Be careful though, there is no way to re-roll the options you see at the end of the room.

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Dressed to Kill

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As you complete end your runs through the Trial Grounds, you will bring back souls. After collecting a certain number of souls, you’ll be rewarded with a Soul Rune. Soul Runes are essentially your level up and the souls are your experience points, if we were to equate this to other RPG mechanics. You use these Soul Runes to socket into the Skill Tree. The Skill Tree can give you passives like attack speed, movement speed, extra HP, or it can give you active abilities in the form of combos. As I used ranged weapons primarily throughout my playthrough, the Finisher ability was a mainstay of my build because it allowed me to have a chance to instant kill non-boss enemies. These Soul Runes can be taken out as you’d like so you are encouraged to experiment with your build along the way, however you can get enough Soul Runes to completely fill out the Skill Tree. So eventually you will not need to decide where your points will need to be spent.

Alongside bringing home Souls, every enemy you kill and resource node you destroy will reward you with materials. These materials can be spent at the Cauldron for your potions, the Loom for your armor, or the Forge for your weapons. There are 32 pieces of gear between weapons and armor in total. The armors are broken into sets that have 2 piece and 4 piece sets. As I mentioned, I used ranged weapons so the Assault Set was stapled to my body as it increased ranged damage with its 2 and 4 set piece bonuses. However, there is some variety to experiment with and some of the armor pieces can be helpful even in the main Hub.

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• Graphics– Colorful art direction, all the different gear changes how you look. The afterlife has never looked so vibrant. There’s a lot going on with all the different enemies, their attacks, and your attacks but the game’s graphics also allow for visual clarity so you’re not bogged down and surprised by attacks that you couldn’t see.
• Gameplay– Gameplay look starts a little slow, the progression for weapons and quests that you are forced into can be a turn off for many players. You are forced into using slow, hard hitting weapons in melee for the first 2/3s of the game and if that’s not your playstyle you are going to have a hard time. The bosses and enemies hit too often and dash away too much to effectively use the melee weapons in the beginning and when you do swing you can get hit by other enemies because there is no animation cancelling or attack cancelling. It gets better, but it’s a rough start.
• Sound– The sound design is a mixed bag. The voice acting is done well and the music is very good. However, the weapon hit sounds all sound like static or something scratchy rubbing against something else scratchy.
• Controls– Controls are pretty standard for the genre. Face buttons for attacks and dashes, triggers for ranged option and D-Pad for consumables. The only part that left me scratching my head was that X (on an XBOX controller) was to confirm your answer in conversations or to craft, so you’d think it would be the confirmation button. However A (on an XBOX controller) was the confirmation for screens, just felt like a weird choice for them to be separate buttons.
• Story– The story is better than I initially expected, the characters all are written well. As you complete quests for each NPC you will unlock more of their story. Some of which you get from their dialogue options but the rest you can read in the in game journal. Your character’s personal story is one of growth and it’s done pretty well.