Grotto Critic Reviews

Grotto is a fresh, unique game with a very interesting concept. Its narrative pacing is uneven, but the story is fantastic, just like its art.

Grotto is an interesting experience that might lose many of its players around halfway through the first play-through. The idea of telling a small number of characters what to do, from the small to the big questions, is an intriguing one. The universe that the developers create is intriguing. I like the way the game moves towards a deeper plot and begins to show the player something deeper than the first few interactions. But everything is too repetitive, and the core narrative needs more variety. I truly wanted to be as careful as possible for each interaction, getting just the right constellation for a supplicant’s needs. But I found myself losing patience at times and simply moving as fast as possible to get to new story bits. Grotto has a solid core concept that never delivers on its promise but I still think that everyone who picks it up should play through it once to see what it has to offer.

Though the process of playing it can occasionally drift into tedium, it’s worth working through the repetition to see the game to its eventual conclusion. In Grotto your choices matter. But they matter in the same way your choices matter in the real world: in ways you can’t see in the moment and may never see at all.

Grotto can be best recommended to those who can look past simple, repetitive gameplay in service of a thick and emotional story. All others should look elsewhere.

Grotto is a heartfelt, visually brilliant narrative game, but its lack of gameplay and interactions tend to eradicate its artistic value.

After several months of stalling and dogged perseverance, I finally finished a 350-page book about the art and struggle of being a Japanese literary translator the other week, and not once did it get me thinking about words and language in the same way Grotto did over the course of five hours. When a game provokes these kinds of feelings in me, I don't mind so much if the choices I'm making are actually a little bit fake. Grotto stands on its own as an engaging story about the way we communicate with others and how their meaning can be polluted and morphed over time, and I reckon fans of such things will likely enjoy it even if the game-y aspects of it feel a little undercooked. If it's a meaningful, branching narrative you're after, though, then you'll be better off finding a different rabbit hole to hunker down in than Brainwash Gang's Grotto.