Grunn [Review]
Can a game be both whimsical and terrifying? Yes.
Grunn. Credit: Sokpop Collective / Tom van den Boogaart
You take on a weekend job to do some gardening in the Dutch countryside. When you arrive by bus, the owner is absent, and you can’t find most of the gardening tools. You’re instructed not to go out after dark and, under no circumstances, enter the house. Not alarming at all. It’ll be fine. Tom van den Boogaart and Sokpop Collective’s Grunn is a very normal gardening game.
You’ll begin to notice many odd things, not just in the garden but in the surrounding areas that you can visit, including the church, the park, a gas station, and more. As time passes, things will change in all these places, always on a set schedule. If you don’t finish in time or trigger any of the game’s many bad endings, you’ll start again with knowledge of the future: what to expect, when events happen, and when or where you’ll find people. You have two days—Saturday and Sunday—so you must take full advantage of what you discover before Monday morning. I couldn’t help but think of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as I played.
Grunn. Credit: Sokpop Collective / Tom van den Boogaart
Grunn is a first-person 3D game. You can run, interact with objects or people, and use various tools. You’ll get gardening shears early, but your other essential tools—the spade and watering can—have been misplaced and must be found. You’ll discover many different items and tools that I won’t spoil here.
Things you do with your tools and without often have unexpected results you may not immediately see. Part of the fun of the game is discovering the nature of the relationship of your actions with the world around you, as well as the consequences of having (or not having) certain items in your possession. The only clues you’ll find are strange polaroids scattered around the game, sometimes labeled with a time of day or other hint, but more often not. You keep these between playthroughs; each photo gets marked as completed each time you fulfill its requirements.
Grunn. Credit: Sokpop Collective / Tom van den Boogaart
Grunn’s mysteries, characters, and interactions have a distinctly Lynchian vibe. Everything seems normal until, as an outsider, you begin experiencing weirdness around the edges. Mundane objects behave unusually or have a supernatural significance you can’t yet grasp. You’ll enter spaces outside the realm of the normal, reminiscent of the otherworldly spaces you’d see in some of Lynch’s work. Some of the characters you meet might as well be inhabitants of Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge.
The game’s graphics are chunky, low-poly, and bright. Everything is textured with solid colors or gradients in a toon-shaded style, except without any outlines. Colors bleed outside the bounds of the edges of the 3D shapes, creating the feeling that the game is running on a display with slight ghosting issues. While the graphics feature the polygon distortion typical of PS1 games, I wouldn’t say the game uses the same retro PlayStation aesthetic many recent games do. The game’s cartoonish visuals and use of color are inconsistent with what I’d expect from horror, making all the unusual stuff you see that much creepier. There are some very effective scares.
Grunn. Credit: Sokpop Collective / Tom van den Boogaart
I had an amazing time with Grunn. I took turns playing with my partner as we worked to piece together the game's mysteries and discover how to get a good ending. Grunn is an unsettling, scary puzzlebox with a whimsical veneer that fully engrossed me. More people should be talking about this game.
Grunn is available now on PC (Steam).
Overall Score: 9/10
Played on: Steam Deck
