After a good 22 or so years in development, Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar is now a game you can purchase, for money, from the Steam store. You'd be excused for not knowing anything about it, but Grimoire has been a running joke dismissed as vaporware or a scam in CRPG circles for multiple decades. This in part to the nature of the man behind the game, Cleveland Mark Blakemore, who has cultivated a Derek Smart-esque reputation for trolling people on the internet for almost as long as there's been an internet. He's spent the most recent period in Grimoire's development hanging out on the RPG Codex forums (A place where people love to hate RPGs almost as much as they love to hate minorities, women, The Globalist Conspiracy, and each other! Don't go there if you value your faith in humanity.) and ran an indiegogo around 5 years ago with a promised release date of "May 2013." It... took a little longer than that. If you want a laugh and a decent view into how nuts Cleve is, I highly recommend watching the bizarre indiegogo pitch video. The dude claims to have built a bunker in the middle of Australia to survive the upcoming apocalyptic race war, so...

There are some other wrinkles to the story than that, but I highly recommend googling it if you want to know more (you maybe don't.) Really, I should probably explain what the game actually is. Blakemore was working on a cancelled sequel to Wizardry 7 for Sir Tech in the early 90s, and seemingly started on Grimoire out of revenge when the project was canned. It shouldn't be too surprising then, that Grimoire plays a lot like an updated version of Wizardry 7, albeit one with a handful of quality of life improvements and an interface straight out of 1995, rather than 1991. Is it any good? Hell if I know. I might pick it up out of curiosity, but I don't know if I have the fortitude to finish an RPG as arcane or intricate as this one seems to be, especially not without the manual, which is supposedly coming... though given who made this game, I guess I'll be waiting a while.

Well if nothing else, it's good to know my kneejerk revulsion when I visited RPG Codex that one time was warranted.

The early Steam reviews seemed split between "This is buggy as hell but at least it's out" and "If you don't like this you're a filthy casual who probably plays Dragon Age" and pure incoherence so I think I'm gonna pass on this one.

Oh my it's like a new Mordor.

Cleve is well-known for being a straight-out bad dude, too. I'm shocked that it came out, but I wouldn't give that guy the thinnest of dimes.

@afashionablehat: Yeah, the comparison to Derek Smart and my reference to the RPG Codex forums were my thinly veiled way of suggesting that Cleve is a racist lunatic, but maybe I should've been more explicit about that.

I should, however, be explicit that me posting about this game is not an endorsement to buy it. Depending on how reception levels out I still might pick it up but I made the topic out of surprise that the game was actually released more than anything else.

@arbitrarywater: Yeah for sure, I figured you knew what you were talking about. Cleve is a real bad dude and he's gone after friends of mine so I'm not shy about making sure that little bit gets out there.

User reviews, overall: Mixed.

Go figure.

Hmm, reminds me a lot of that other first-person turn-based dungeon crawling RPG with 'Grim' in the title. That's had two games released by now.

I don't know about the shady developer business but I still don't really see at face value why I should buy into this over other similar games in recent years.

Nioh and Final Fantasy XV are up there as well (though they're good/great games).