Great God Grove review

There is nothing more refreshing than playing something that manages to combine a fierce sense of originality, a wonderfully oddball, idiosyncratic gameplay loop, and a warming sense of nostalgia. Narratively driven puzzle actioner Great God Grove puts you in the shoes of what can best be described as a unifying celestial postie, tasked with putting the brakes on a potential world-ending event by using the power of the written word to stop a bunch of bickering deities from allowing their beef to bring forth a devastating apocalypse.

You see, the previous individual in charge of delivering mail on the loony island setting has upped and gone, and you inherit their extremely important role as the Postman Pat of the archipelago, however way that you do things certainly doesn’t resemble the average round of a UK postman. For starters you have a megaphone that, in the timeless words of Wayne and Garth, is able to both suck and blow at the same time. You encounter denizens of the world and can hoover up their actual dialogue and words, and then spurt them out in order to solve language-based puzzles.

The characters and situations you encounter are as batshit crazy as they are charming, with umpteen different concurrent mini-stories within the overarching tale. The Gods are a suitably odd bunch, a rag-tag menagerie of neuroses and unreasonable emotionally charged behaviour. Your suction megaphone can eat up to five pieces of dialogue ripped from speech bubbles at any one time, and it is up to you to act as a hybrid of mailman, messenger and fixer, picking appropriate pieces of this vacuumed word salad to enact peace, harmony and happiness.

This may be delivering a love note, or using the function to absorb the password to a hitherto locked away area, and the amount of available dialogue and characters means that there are myriad possibilities and some quite left field puzzle solutions, not to mention an absolute tonne of genuinely hilarious conversations and reactions. It isn’t all about the sucky-blowy wordplay, though. You also get to use your unique tool to physically perform other actions like flipping switches and picking up objects.

This really is quite unlike any game I have ever played, although it does come with some design choices that are evocative of other similarly idiosyncratic classics in video game history. The artwork is absolutely sensational, a mixture of captivating 2D drawings that segue into woozy 3D during certain sections, in particular when you encounter the Gods.

Some scenes feel like little dioramas that you are peering into; the 2D bits and the way things move evoked memories of Sony’s great Parappa/Um Jammer Lammy-verse. But then there is the lunatic inclusion of puppetry, which I won’t spoil for you but will say that they both delighted and disturbed me in a way that I haven’t felt since anthropomorphic felt nightmare Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.

I cannot recommend this one enough for those of you who seek something completely out of left field, as it delivers an experience that had me utterly hooked in from the moment I watched the bloody trailer, until the moment I had cracked the thing and brought peace and harmony to the Grove by hook or by crook, one daft conversation at a time. Absolutely magical.