Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride

Another Artifex Mundi title for 100% and this one gave me more issues than the other 5 combined – I’m not really sure why as it’s not like it’s the first one they made.

Grim Legends follows the story of a girl called ‘Lily’s sister’ who has come to watch Lily get married. However, it all goes horribly wrong when Lily is kidnapped by a giant bear that can open doors and work secret passageways, and it’s up to Lily’s sister and fiancé to go and save her. In true Mundi style however, it all turns out to be the other way around and the fiancé is actually the evil one and the bear is actually trying to save her. This is really stupid because if you wanted to make it look like you were saving someone, running in on a party, trashing the place and injuring a bunch of people isn’t the best way to go about it.

The gameplay is a bit different too in that it moves quite quickly at the beginning and flashes through the first scenes as you chase down the bear. There is very little backtracking required and only one or two puzzles per scene. The game is then broken into mini segments. You will have two of three scenes which are all connected with no reason to backtrack further than this for any given section.

There is a new mini game included which sees you playing Dominoes instead of hidden object scenes and this was actually one of the better ones I’ve played. It’s still mostly down to luck though. You can’t make the moves if you don’t have the tiles.

The final observation was one of the main protagonist and that she seems to have an unlimited amount of abilities when it comes to getting things done, whether that be repairing gloves, heavy lifting, rope making and blacksmithing. There’s no end to her skills!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

With the addition of the dominoes game, there’s unfortunately another double run through of the story required to get 100%. Now there were lots of twists getting the full achievement set and I’m not sure if it’s bad coding or what, but one of them certainly didn’t unlock when it was supposed to.

Anyway, the standard completing all the mini games and hidden picture scenes without skipping are here but this time, they apply to the story and the bonus chapter as well. You can be forgiven for omitting rage and screaming at a broken game after completing five others where these unlock at the end of the main game but knowing is half the battle here.

That said, after I completed the game on expert, the achievement for doing so did not unlock for me – not even after completion of the bonus chapter. As you can imagine, I was annoyed as I could not see a reason why it hadn’t unlocked. I had accidently clicked the hint button twice through the playthrough but this hadn’t had an impact on any of the other achievements. It’s the only thing I did differently as well so I can only assume that there is some hidden requirement to not press the hint button at any point.

Other than this, there’s nothing different from the other games in the series.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the achievement fuck-up Grim Legends is a good addition to the series. I didn’t really feel like it did anything differently other than tell a different story in a different environment. The stories and the hidden picture scenes are the main selling points of the series so there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. Except the achievements. Which are broken.