First Impressions: Grimm's Folly (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Grimm's Folly through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Grimm's Folly

Systems: Windows, Steam OS

Release Date: March 14, 2025

Publisher: Gray Days Entertainment

Developer: Gray Days Entertainment

Time Spent: 86 Minutes

Grimm's Folly started out somewhat promising, with a series of environmental puzzles offered in both first and third person perspectives, along with an oddly placed time trial racing mode that I had yet to determine its significance on the larger whole of the story.  You play as the character of Alex, who has been mysteriously taken into a realm called the Mind Palace by an unknown entity in an apparent swapping of matter, along with a hyper-intelligent crow who seems to know more about this place than your character.  As you play, you primarily control Alex in a first-person perspective, but at will, you're able to switch over to play as the crow who waits for you at your next puzzle location.  As the crow, you're able to fly around the playable area and, for reasons yet undiscovered, engage in a timed race mode where you fly through golden rings as fast as possible.  As you uncover puzzles and different enclosed locations in this Mind Palace, which includes unoccupied but fully furnished buildings, you uncover more and more of the lore behind this place, your captivity, and, I presume, a way to escape.

Now, the game is longer than the 86 minutes I played, but I encountered on two separate occasions glitches with the camera controls.  Playing on the Steam Deck, I didn't need to do any controller/button remapping on the back end, and the game natively offers inverted y-axis toggling, so that was a nice change of pace.  The first time something strange happened was at about 14:00 when I was searching through the school/library building.  At that moment, the game took control of the camera to focus the player's attention on the crow that was sitting on the telescope as well as the journal on the table.  After this integrated cutscene, I was not able to look down, which you can tell as the camera shakes every time I pressed the joystick up.  I thought maybe if I changed perspectives to the crow, be it by taking control or playing the time trial, it might reset the camera, but apparently, only saving and quitting was able to fix the problem.

The second time occurred when I started our third video and discovered that the Look Sensitivity setting was all wonky.  I tried moving the sensitivity around to different settings, but even that had my turning at an excruciatingly slow pace.  The biggest change I was able to make was by reducing the Look Sensitivity to effectively zero, saving and quitting, then starting back up and increasing the setting to max, but again, that still made the game unplayable.  My only other option would be to start up a new game and hope that this problem is fixed, but the thought of starting over, even as early as I feel like I am in the game, is not something that I'm eager to do.  The two possible outcomes from this are either that this will fix the problem and I start from the beginning or that the sensitivity is still not working correctly and the game auto-saved over my only save file.  So again, I'm not enticed either way.

It's all rather a shame because I thought the dual mechanic of controlling a crow and a human could have been intriguing, even if the time trial came across as a bit silly and out of place.  I liked being able to swap over to the crow when I wasn't sure where I was supposed to go and could look around (as the crow) to get my bearings.  I was interested in knowing more about the crow as well as how and why the crow couldn't see the player character even when they were standing right in front of each other.  Was that a purposeful choice narratively, or was it due to developer limitations?  Maybe both?

So this is where our journey with Grimm's Folly ends.  Sadly glitched/bugged out of the energy and gusto to continue or, at the very least, to find out what happens if I restart the game, which isn't a particularly great feeling to have.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S. Our incomplete playlist over YouTube.