American McGee's Grimm

Story

Episode 1: A Boy Learns What Fear Is

The first episode follows the story of a Boy that wants to learn what fear is. A crude and nasty bearded dwarf named Grimm narrates the story of a boy who leaves his father and his village in order to learn what fear is. At first he goes to watch the hanging of criminals to learn fear, but instead the boy learns that they were wrongly accused of stealing a bell. The boy then proceeds to a school, where the bell is found, and rust on the bell is found on the schoolmaster's hands, and he admits his guilt. Next the boy heads to the King to learn fear by staying the night in his haunted castle, which would excommunicate the ghosts inside, and in return the King would let him marry his daughter. Yet still even then the boy did not learn fear, and he slept through the night, and got married to the princess. At this point Grim is sick of the story, and apparently goes into the story from the beginning to change it for the worse. He changes the gallows into a macabre scene of human death, the guilty teacher is burned alive by his pupils, the castle becomes terrifying, the king's daughter is turned into a wheezing pig, and these together are finally enough to scare the boy and teach him exactly what fear is. Grimm decides that the moral of the story is that "Both surprise and fear will cause you to mess your pants." Brilliant.

Gameplay

Players control Grimm who turns the happy-go-lucky levels around him into a darker and more sinister places. Objects, people, and animals around him into fouler things. The more he transforms the faster he can run and the greater his transformative abilities and radius become. In each level there are people and fluffy animals that can clean up Grimm's mess, but when his transformative powers are strong enough he can convert those that would clean up his mess into darker forms. Grim can also jump, urinate, and perform butt stomps. Some objects have to be buttstomped after converting enough of the level into a more sinister world. A bar at the top of the screen interprets the level's transformation into ranks such as "Smelly", "Stinky", "Nasty" and so forth. Grimm will display objects, people, or animals and tell you to make them Nasty, Smelly, or Stinky with either his mere presence or the use of buttstomps. The level is won when it is totally converted from light to dark and all of the set pieces are stomped. If Grimm falls in lava, or water, he respawns at the start of each level, while a minor inconvenience, he apparently can not die. Each level has secret coins and medals that can be earned if completed fast enough.

PC System Requirements

Minimum

• 2.4 GHz Single Core Pentium Processor
• 512 MB of System RAM
• Nvidia 6200 or equivalent video card with 128MB Video RAM
• 500 MB of Free Hard Drive Space

Recommended

• 2.0 GHz Dual Core Processor or 3GHz Single Core Processor
• 1 GB of System RAM
• NVIDIA 7600 or ATI x1300 Video Card
• 500 MB of Free Hard Drive Space
• Recommended audio: SoundBlaster® X-Fi™ series