Legend of Grimrock: Complete! (And thoughts)

I just spent probably 7 hours today just playing Grimrock,
so it might take me a second to decompress enough to actually get my thoughts about the whole thing down.

... Okay. I think I am ready.

HOLY COW WHAT A DISAPPOINTING GAME

Everything about Grimrock, from the start, was screaming YO, REMEMBER THOSE OLD 3D RPGS?! WE MADE ONE. And, as much as all caps and bold would make you think that I wasn't into that message, my actual response in return was a resounding OH HELL YEAH.

For the first two hours or so, I was in love with the game. Moving around as a single unit, clicking on everybody's individual skills to trigger them in real time as their cooldowns expired like I am playing some kind of weird RPG adaptation of Simon; heck I was even into the weird flavor of the enemies.

Just look at this little guy. His claws say "hello", but his armor class says "HAHA YOU FOOL, HOW DARE YOU ATTEMPT TO PIERCE THE HIDE OF CRABULON THE MASTER"

But as time went on, everything just got... So repetitive? The best strategy for fighting anything was to dance around it in a circle, which while fun to discover, nothing really ever figured out how to thwart this tactic, so I did it for nearly 6 hours. Maybe that's a "my bad" kind of thing, not sure, but I know as a fact that if I didn't do that my characters would have spent a lot of time dying since EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME HITS LIKE A TRUCK.

I had a lady minotaur decked out in late game super armor, she was specced super hard into wearing armor well. DIES IN 5-ISH HITS ANYWAYYYY~~~*. BAH

While I am complaining, levelling up in the game might as well not even happen. Outside of the wizard class, no one actually gets access to anything new when they level up their skills. They get the ability to do slightly more damage, or occasionally proc a random effect on attack, but that's IT. Which, in the end, meant I spent a lot of time just running in circles around things, clicking the exact same patterns of attacks, over, and over, and over, through the whole game.

And while I complain, I am going to write a thing about the final boss in big angry letters, and probably a picture, so if you actually care to play through the game yourself, TLDR: the game made me salty and I am glad it is over. You can close the window now.

I will just kinda add a buffer for a bit so that people don't accidentally see the big words.

A little more.

Probably almost there.

Okay. Surely it is fine now.

THE FINAL BOSS WAS A BLOCK THAT JUST CHASED YOU AROUND AND IF IT MANAGED TO CATCH YOU YOU INSTANTLY DIED.

Pretty much this. Not even joking. It rolled at you.

I spent 8 hours, following along with some light intrigue in the story, getting real curious about the crazy things that built a dungeon that you entered from the TOP and exited from the BOTTOM, AND THEN THE FINAL BOSS FIGHT WAS AGAINST AN ANGRY CUBE.

The game tries to explain it as it being a horrible immortal creature, which, it very much wasn't since I killed the dang thing, and that it was imprisoned in the dungeon to stop it from... Rolling around, I guess? It was an awful lot of work when you could probably have put the thing at the bottom of a hole with 90 degree edges and the thing would be doomed.

I am so mad. Bah. Glad to have this one behind me.