I Guess You Can't Review a Free Game

The first episode of American McGee's Grimm is out today on the GameTap download service. It's called A Boy Learns What Fear Is, and I was all set to review it this morning--until I found out it's free not just today, but every day, from now until our Sun enters the red giant phase and engulfs the Earth in its fiery tumescence. (GameTap had previously announced that each episode of Grimm will be free-to-play for only 24 hours after its release, which is still true of all the rest of them.) Slapping a rating on what's essentially a free demo feels like a pointless exercise, so here we are on the blog.

The free-for-a-day policy seems a little risky if GameTap wants to make Grimm episode sales a significant revenue stream. If the brevity of the first episode is any indication, you could easily get your fill of each subsequent installment in one sitting, making it possible to play the entire season (eight episodes, at one per week) without paying for it. Of course, Grimm may be intended as a loss-leader that gets you to install the GameTap client and maybe consider signing up for it in the process, and I think the game is interesting enough to serve that function...just barely.

I've been excited about Grimm because it's conceptually similar to the last McGee-branded game that I was way into, Alice. Both of them take beloved fairytale worlds--worlds that have been diluted and Disney-fied over the years--and sully them right up with sinister art design, gleefully macabre storylines, and uncomfortable ambience. Grimm gets all that stuff right. The writing is articulate and sometimes funny, with suitable voiceover to match, and there are enough unpleasant events for you to scrunch up your face at. (In one area, you turn a bunch of children into walking matchsticks so they can burn their teacher alive at the stake. A fair number of people get turned into animals, or bloody chunks of gore, too.) I wish GameTap had started with one of the more recognizable stories, like Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast; it would have made for a  more meaningful contrast between the family-friendly modern version of the story and the sadistic old morality tale you turn it into.

Alas, Grimm just doesn't offer all that much for you to do. Alice was a full-featured third-person action game, with different weapons and puzzles. In Grimm, all you really do is spread your pestilence and filth around each pristine storybook level, which in gameplay terms means simply running around and covering every square inch of clean ground you can find. There's a brief amount of platforming in this first episode, and the way each objects animates as it changes from pretty to ugly is actually pretty striking. But there just isn't much here to engage you beyond the visuals, and the whole thing is over in an hour or less.

I'm still hopeful for the later installments of Grimm, if they incorporate more meaningful gameplay elements than what's on offer in this first episode. Heavier platforming elements and some power-ups (not to mention some sort of combat) would certainly help. McGee's development house Spicy Horse (a name I give five stars) has done some good work with the Unreal Engine and the stylized artwork here; I just hope they build a better game with them in the coming weeks. But hey, who am I to judge? Feel free to go check out the game for yourself and post your own user review.