Primrose, a young witch, has moved to the magical groves she visited in her youth to begin training in earnest under Lavender, but something is wrong. The garden is empty, all the fields are overrun, and the happy, friendly plants are just plain gone. But all hope is not lost, Lavender assures her. With grit, determination, and a little bit of magic, Primrose can take to the forest, find the missing plants, befriend them, return the grove to its former glory, and set right what has gone wrong in the forest. This is the premise at the start of Stardust’s Grimoire Groves, a self-described “cozy roguelite”.
And cozy it is. Many roguelites are designed with a moody gothic or industrial science fiction vibe with lots of heavy jagged lines, angular designs and intense soundtracks. But this is not so for Grimoire Grove; the music is gentle, everpresent but not overbearing, the colors are pastel, every creature and plant foe is designed in soft, rounded, almost lineless, styles, and the sound effects are gentle, almost cartoony, tones. The entire aesthetic is cozy from top to bottom, designed to help you relax and unwind.
So it’s cozy, but is it a roguelite? Specifically, Grimoire Grove is a top-down action roguelite as opposed to a turn-based roguelite (Shiren the Wanderer, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and Izuna the Unemployed Ninja for example). This means that the action isn’t limited to just when the player makes a move or action, but flows freely, and by the same token, the play and the foes can also move about freely instead of being limited to a grid system.
Yes, there are foes even though it’s a cozy game. While you aren’t fighting in a traditional sense, there are ‘enemies’ to overcome in the form of the various mobile plants you must win over and befriend through your magic. Each enemy reacts to you differently. Some are just overly clingy but relatively harmless, requiring you to dash out of their grip to keep plying them with magic, while others are a bit more aggressive and can take away chunks of your energy by blundering into you. The plants can also drain your energy if they’re aware of you and too much time passes without them getting a taste of your magic, and the energy drain gets stronger the further away from interested plants you get. The drain does end when you manage to get a plant to plant itself into the ground after being fed enough, so you are encouraged to focus on feeding small groups of plants quickly whenever possible, but otherwise you are not punished for dawdling in a given dungeon level in any way. Grimoire Grove actually encourages you to go around the level and harvest resources from all the magically fed plants and random forage spots in the dungeon, as well as to interact with the forest denizens you can meet in the various levels. This is a game about social interactions as much as it about taming plant creatures for your witchy garden.
Let’s take a look at a basic gameplay loop. You start in Lavender’s garden and go through one of the four gates into the forest – one gate for each elemental zone – and you tame plants with your magic spell. Once tamed, each plant dives into the ground and can be harvested for various resources. The first time you tame a plant it will drop a special seed to take home with you. On each level you search to find plants, forest denizens and the door to the next level to the forest and the door to Lavender’s garden. You do this either until you run out of energy (in which case you fall asleep and wake up in the garden minus some but not all of your gathered resources), you reach the end of the dungeon, or you go back to Lavender’s garden. Each zone of the forest will tell you how many levels it has when you enter it, and you get an icon indicating what sort of level you’ll enter after going through a door. Each level maps itself out as you travel, so you can easily navigate back through the twisty forest paths if, for example, you want to revisit an NPC before heading through the door deeper into the forest.
When you’re in Lavender’s garden you have access to all of the resources gathered on the last run through the forest. First things first you plant any newly obtained seed into it’s designated plot, and if possible feed it resources to fill out its entry in the garden log (which also contains information on all of the game’s quests, the forest NPCs, Primrose’s spells and more), and then go around the garden using whatever gathered resources you collected to craft gifts and upgrades, unlock new spells and elemental affinities, upgrade existing areas, and all the sorts of other things you might expect to find at a base in a roguelite.
The kicker here is that, except for craftable items, you don’t have to do any of these in one go. In a traditional roguelite, you would need to collect a certain amount of currency all at once to buy or upgrade a new movement option or attack and then take it into exploration (and even then it might still get lost if you have a bad run), but in Grimoire Groves you can pay for upgrades bit by bit. Say a spell takes seven of one of the resources and six of another but you only have five of each, you can invest those resources now so you now only have to invest the remaining resources the next time you return from a dungeon run. You might be asking “why can’t you just hold onto these resources indefinitely?” And it’s because this is a roguelite and that’s against the spirit of the genre, so they all have to get turned into compost – the game’s closest thing to a currency – whenever you start a forest run. Compost can only be gathered when starting a forest run, but it’s not subject to being lost or removed between dungeon runs. This is good because it can be used mid-dungeon to buy certain things like energy refills from friendly NPCS, though doing so does involve a cooking minigame where you must mix up and properly heat the item you purchase, which makes it more effective. However, a way to practice this process in the garden might be nice. Each NPC I’ve met has started with two items available in their store, with more unlocked for improving your friendship with them, which can be done by gifting them items that can be found in the forest or crafted at the workbench in the garden. There is one other exception to the rule that you can bring items piecemeal, and that’s quest resources for forest NPCs. As the NPCs live in the forest and resources have to be composted before a dungeon run, you have to gather all your resources to hand to an NPC in a single forest run.
Despite that and the inherently grindy nature of roguelite games at their core, Grimoire Groves is extremely respectful of your time, allowing you to quit a run at any time without penalty and encouraging you to go at your own pace. Despite its cozy nature, it does still have something for veteran roguelite players, and more than enough cozy to chill and relax with for hours upon hours.
Tim played Grimoire Groves on PC with a provided review copy.
