Sometimes the issue with an extremely codified genre like the humble explormer is that developers get a little too focused in ticking boxes rather than trying to expand its boundaries to an extent that their game becomes not only a distinct entity but one that finds its own reason for being. It's both nerve-wracking and difficult to avoid the simpler path of creating some by-the-numbers affair, especially if you're a small team (or just by yourself), so for as much as I had my issues with Grizzland from Khud0 I recognize and appreciate that the developer went out of their way to give it a very uncommon vibe.

Grizzland belongs in that camp of very graphically lo-fi explormers like VVVVVV and Xeodrifter, adapting a visual pixel style that somehow feels even more basic than 8-bit. The kind of game that could theoretically run on a graphing calculator, and not just because most of it is depicted in monochrome. You have the usual explormer trappings: run around jumping up platforms, hitting enemies with swords (or the bow once you find it), acquiring power-ups that allow you to access previously inaccessible areas, and working towards uncovering the whole map and reaching the game's end. However, despite giving you the map from the outset, there's some amount of obfuscation at work as you explore this Atari 2600-esque world of vaguely recognizable pixel creatures.

Part of that obtuseness comes from a collection of notes that tell a very different story from the rudimentary one offered by the main gameplay as a framing device: one that speaks to an expeditionary force of spacefaring humans who crash landed on a planet and struggled to survive, having lost their engineer and thus losing their only chance of escape. The more of these notes you find, the more the story begins to look very different to the one you're experiencing; to say more would give away spoilers, but it's playing around with conventions and the standard hero's journey, and eventually becomes the crux of the game progression in addition to the cycle of finding new upgrades and seeing where they allow you to access next.

Your primary goal, on the surface anyway, is to find water to nourish a series of sapient trees who will then transport you higher up on the world map. This involves exploring the full extent of the horizontal plane you're on for bottles of water, and the game will helpfully give you some indication of the direction in which they can be found if you idle for a few seconds. Each vertical layer of the game as you go higher has more elaborately interwoven level design, has tougher challenges including boss fights, more distance between checkpoints, and trickier applications of the power-ups you've found so far. The game is very fond of its mysteries, including the aforementioned notes but also a collection of "secret places" which mostly function as fourth-wall-breaking developer rooms full of left over ideas, which offer some intriguing looks into what the game might have become (one room, that just has a bear in it, is supposedly a prototype for when the game was still called "Grizzlyland"; I'm not sure the developer was entirely being honest there). It's also one of the few explormers to offer side-quests, many of which require a little bit of legwork to resolve and provide some useful rewards that might take a while to come into play.

Between the simple mechanics and simpler graphical presentation, it's easy to mistake Grizzland as some very low-budget explormer. To an extent it is that, sold as it is on Steam for $5 and regularly discounted at a fraction of that price, but the sense of mystery provided by the notes, the copious number of secrets, the very hands-off approach to its narrative beyond a few chatty NPCs, and the layer of abstraction that its lo-fi monochrome graphics generate serves to give the game an edge that makes it sit in the memory longer than many of its peers. Even so, and despite establishing itself as a "weird game", it's accommodating almost to a fault: receiving the full map upon starting with unexplored areas depicted in a darker shade of grey, the little indicators to tell you roughly where you need to head next, various purchasable upgrades to make the combat easier to handle—they all serve to demystify the parts of the game that didn't need mystifying, specifically what you should be doing and how, and leaving you to figure out the peripheral elements that are the more fun to puzzle over.

All that said, actually playing the game doesn't always make for a great time. The platforming is adequate enough with its level of precision and air control, especially once you get the double-jump (you also have to find the regular jump too, which means the game gets to do that fun level design thing where it funnels you downwards in a specific direction for a while), but the combat is some really rough business where sword swings take forever to recover from and enemy hitboxes aren't as intuitive as you'd hope. I might be punishing Grizzland a little harder for its disagreeable combat because I just finished another game that had a similar issue (Oninaki), where you leave yourself so exposed by the amount of frames and time it takes to recover from performing any attack that you mostly want to run past everything instead, which will likely still get you hit by very persistent foes like the bats and the dogs. I get that it's the kind of combat system that has you choose your moment to strike more cautiously, since you can't just go in swinging like crazy and expect to emerge unscathed, but the languor in those attack delays deprives it of a satisfactory feel. I'm also not sure if this was intended or not, but completing the very tough and long final boss fight just produced a white screen and a cacophonous din for like a minute straight which has to be the least I've liked a video game ending in a long while (there is a suggestion that it wasn't the game's best ending, but I'm not sure I still care enough to dig deep enough to find out what that is).

On the whole, while I appreciate Grizzland's attempts at setting itself apart not by some revolutionary new mechanics but by embodying a whole different atmosphere, half of its gameplay loop just didn't appeal at all (combat) and the other half (platforming) was merely perfunctory for the most part. Still, it's a game that shows a lot of promise if the developer ever decides to return to the genre in a more confident fashion not least of which because of its intelligent approach to dropping players into an enigmatic scenario where nothing's quite how it may seem without also being so obtuse that those same players go running to the hills.

Rating: 3 out of 5.