Grim Trials Review | Disappointing Across The Board

I randomly came across Grim Trials on Steam around six months ago, and I was immediately intrigued. You play as Aveline, a recently deceased girl chosen to become a Grim Reaper trainee.

How cool is that!?! 

I tried the demo and liked it. Problem is, I’ve played quite a few more action roguelikes since then, including bangers like Cult of the Lamb, Absolum, and Cinderia. My bar for what makes an excellent title in this niche has risen since then.

Compared to those games, Grim Trials feels like something I might’ve played five years ago. It’s serviceable, but almost everything it does feels underwhelming in some way.

Lagging Behind Its Peers

It’s too bad because Grim Trials makes a good first impression.

The game combines edgy cartoon art with decent voice acting and a great hard rock soundtrack. Aveline, the protagonist, is well designed, and I love that they gave her a scythe as her starting weapon to reflect her new profession. 

She’s supported by a relatively creative cast of NPCs that includes a six-eyed dog, a blue lynx-like cat, a researcher with a cow’s head, and a spider with a human’s head. The Academy where Aveline awakens features some cool, theme-appropriate decor, and the Trial Grounds dungeons look good too. 

I appreciated that Grim Trials didn’t waste any time getting me into the action, and I had fun playing through my opening run. 

The combat was simple and familiar at first. I moved from room to room beating up baddies with melee and ranged attacks, collecting resource drops, and choosing random buffs after each clear. All the action roguelike basics were there, and I couldn’t really fault Grim Trials on how it executed the fundamentals.

But the more I played, the more I started to notice where it fell behind compared to its peers. 

For example, today’s roguelikes tend to include a variety of encounter types on their maps, like elite fights, events, healing rooms, shops, resource nodes, and so on. Grim Trials, on the other hand, limited its room types to regular fights, resource nodes, and treasure rooms that contained random potions.

The encounters themselves lacked variety too because they only fielded to two unit types per room. Unlike other games that randomly generate encounters, Grim Trials clearly used presets that would appear in the same order each run. As a result, I was able to breeze my way through each level once I figured out how to deal with each enemy pairing.

Grim Trials could’ve distinguished itself by fleshing out its unique premise with lore about what happens in the afterlife or what it’s like being a grim reaper. Instead, the team chose to focus almost entirely on Aveline’s personal struggle with her transformation.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that Glory Jam barely explored any of it. Most of the dialogue is about Aveline telling her trainer that she feels like she’s losing more of herself after each mission. He then repeatedly tells her to trust the process, and directs her to another NPC to hear their tale of woe.

The game tries to inject some variety with side quests, but they mainly involve fetching materials or using gear to kill enemies in the Trial Grounds.

Again, nothing I’ve mentioned so far is overtly bad. There’s just nothing outstanding that clearly elevates Grim Trials to the level of better action roguelikes.

Lots of Ideas That Go Nowhere

Things just keep unravelling from there because of how quickly everything becomes repetitive.

For example, Aveline can launch a three-hit combo with her scythe…and that’s pretty much the extent of melee combat. The axe you craft in the tutorial only performs a very slow two-hit combo, and the hammer you get half-way through the game deals one attack at a time. Each weapon is also supposed to have a “unique” special move. In practice, however, Aveline just swings them in a arc.

I stuck with the hammer most of the way until I was able to master craft the scythe — after which the other weapons paled in comparison.

Like in all roguelikes, you can build up Aveline with a buff after each successful encounter that only lasts for the run. There are only around 15 to choose from, and Grim Trials tries to compensate for that by making each one upgradeable to level four. 

Less choices led me to stick with the same ones throughout the game. The effect that would heal me after a melee kill almost always guaranteed I’d make it to the boss room. I had no problems finding it each run, and once it was maxed, I would simply prioritize melee damage-scaling bonuses. In effect, my build was the same from run to run, and there was very little reason for me to optimize or change it.

Not that it mattered much, because I only had two build possibilities to begin with — ranged or melee. Melee had an overwhelming advantage because of the higher damage output. I managed to get a good ranged build going at times, but it took longer to clear rooms and it wasn’t nearly as satisfying.

The skill tree reinforced close combat too. Glory Jam had the good idea to split it into specialist paths, but only the ranger’s path impacted ranged attacks directly. Every other node improved support attributes, like health and crit chance, or unlocked more close-range moves.

I spent the whole game using the exact same tactic of baiting enemies to attack and rushing in to finish them off with big melee hits after they committed. My only real source of progression came from padding stats with gear, potions and room buffs, so the gameplay grew old by the time I reached the third area.

Crafting was one of the few systems that stood out because it featured a fun timing mini-game. Executing a pattern perfectly resulted in better gear, which gave me a good reason to keep trying. I enjoyed it for a while, but even it got stale because it never evolved beyond adding more timed button presses. 

The bottom line is that Grim Trials’ gameplay feels exactly the same no matter how much progress I made. There was no real way to change my playstyle, and no reason to take a different approach. That’s a major problem in a genre that asks you to repeat the same stages over and over.

Done Before It Gets Going

That constant repetition made the game very easy to figure out and clear.

It only took me around nine hours to finish Grim Trials, and surprisingly, only the first and final bosses gave me any real trouble. Once I got my hands on good gear and skills, I pretty much cleared everything on my first try. I only hit a wall at the start of the third area, and I got past that by grinding for about an hour.

Logically, you would assume all that grinding was to build better gear or unlock more skill nodes. Actually, I needed materials to craft more potions! Specifically, ones that increased damage, movement speed, or luck. You can stack each of their effects up to 12 times per room, and melting away bosses becomes kind of trivial when you do.

That’s why it only took me three tries to beat the two-staged final boss. Two honest ones, and a third where I chugged 36 potions right at the start. On top of that, I finished him off without clearing all the side-quests, crafting all the gear, and maxing out my skill tree.

I could’ve kept playing through that leftover content, there just wasn’t a good reason to do so.

Beating the main story didn’t lead to harder end game content or a New Game + feature. There was an arena mode where I could fight an endless stream of regular enemies I already faced a hundre times. Another room in the Academy let me fight bosses again, but without making them any harder. What’s the point when there’s no reward for doing so?

Unless you’re hunting achievements, Grim Trials feels like a very short, one-shot experience. Again, that’s not great when replayability is one of the main selling points of roguelike titles.

Verdict

I didn’t hate my time with Grim Trials. The arcade-style combat was entertaining enough, the art direction was attractive, and there were some bright spots in the crafting and progression that kept me going.

It just didn’t push any roguelike boundaries at all, and it failed to build on its own good ideas.

Almost everything the game introduced got repetitive early and I ran out of content to complete before I finished fully exploring the game’s systems. Being just “OK” isn’t enough in a genre filled with better alternatives at that $20 USD price point.

That’s why Grim Trials belongs in the bargain bin. It under-delivers at a time when roguelikes have taken a big step forward, and my recommendation is to wait for a sale if you’re looking to pick it up.