Play it on: PC
Current goal: Discover the truth at the heart of the world
For the past few weeks, I’ve been singing the praises of UFO 50 here in the pages of the Weekend Guide, and indeed, it seems likely that this extraordinary collection of games by UFO Soft, a developer of the 1980s that never actually existed, will dominate my gaming time once again this Saturday and Sunday. However, rather than once again talking up the collection as a whole for this week’s entry, I’m going to focus on the one game I’ve been playing most within UFO 50 of late: Grimstone, the collection’s epic JRPG.
In many ways, Grimstone feels like a traditional early JRPG. It’s more Final Fantasy I than Final Fantasy IV or VI, with its blank-slate characters who never speak or have any personality beyond what you can glean from their expressive sprites and their natural tendencies toward sharpshootin’, shotgunnin’, or whatever their particular specialty might be. However, as those weapons may have indicated, Grimstone does differ from most early JRPGs in one crucial way: it eschews the traditional fantasy setting most of them employed for a really terrific “weird west” world, one in which gunslingers and ghost towns coexist alongside angels, demons, and all manner of strange and unsettling creatures and happenings. And even if the characters in your party don’t have much depth, the world itself does. What at first seems like a landscape against which a simplistic battle of good and evil is playing out reveals itself to be more complex and intriguing as you persevere through Grimstone’s surprisingly lengthy quest.
I think I’m finally nearing the end of that quest after playing Grimstone pretty obsessively in recent days, though I still have no idea quite what I’ll find at the end of the mysterious late-game dungeon that now awaits me. One thing I do know, however, is that no matter what I find, finishing Grimstone will hardly mark the end of my time with UFO 50, as it still has so many wonderful games whose surfaces I have yet to really scratch. — Carolyn Petit