Grimoire Groves Review

Game: Grimoire Groves
Genre: Action RPG
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Stardust
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $16.99 | UK £14.23 | EU € 16,57
Release Date: March 4th, 2025

A review code was provided, and many thanks to Future Friends PR.

There’s plenty of room for games that take an active hand in nurturing faded towns and gardens back to health. Harvestella and Rune Factory are probably the genre-shapers when it comes to blending Action RPG mechanics with revitalizing the land. Grimoire Groves is a new indie game taking its own spin on this faster method of magical regrowth. It focuses on rogue-lite combat mechanics that may feel familiar to fans of Cult of the Lamb or even a very mild version of Diablo.

All that action comes back to base to feed what you’ve collected into a loop of upgrading a variety of skills and tools and progressing your relationship with a variety of lonely denizens lost in the groves. But how does it all come together, and is the loop enjoyable? The answer is complicated, and we’re going to break it down for you.

The Pastel Wilds of Grimoire Groves

To start things off light, the aesthetic of Grimoire Groves is on point. The developers quickly committed to a multi-hued pastel color set and a series of visuals that will happily engage fans of Adventure Time (right down to the occasional bit of odd technology blended with nature), and that also makes this game a lure for fans of Ooblets. It’s that same perky to the point of saccharine cuteness driving the world of the Groves, and it’s nice to see it all come cohesively together.

I was worried by how light the visuals were from the point of accessibility, and I checked with my colorblind partner (deuteranopia, affects green tones), who had no issues with three out of four of the color-elemental power palettes you’ll have access to. But some big issues gum up the works when it comes to streamlining your runs through the forest. We’ll get to that when it comes to pulling the game loop together.

What Are We Doing In The Grimoire Groves?

Most farming sims and action-harvesters are a wealth of stories when it comes to explaining why it’s up to you to heal the world, even if that story is revealed in bits and pieces. Grimoire Groves puts you in charge of a young girl named Primrose, who eagerly lunges towards an elder witch at the flick of your controls. The elder witch is Lavender, and she’s going to teach you how to use magic to revitalize the weakened plants of the groves. Why you? Why do you and Lavender know each other? Beats me, folks.

I found a post on the Steam forums from 2023 that suggested the developers were working on the story, but there’s little sign of that. Eventually, Lavender sets you loose on the roguelite groves to gather goodies and get seeds from new plants, and on occasion, you’ll meet new and incredibly drawn people to befriend! Yay? The game gives you little info about these guys, either. Your portfolio pages are a couple of lines of bio with their likes and dislikes. Their behaviours are static, and they’ll occasionally give you quests to collect stuff for them. Herein lies two issues:

Once you get the quest for, let’s say, twenty petals of Foo and twenty sticks of Boo, there’s a good chance you already have it and can clear the quest. But if you don’t or have to go talk to Lavender first, you’ll have to finish your loop and restart. The nature of the loop means you use or compost everything you find before re-entering the Groves. So you have to hope you find the right stuff before you find that character again, even if you find them on that loop!

The other issue is this: a couple of them offer you a minigame to create an energy-restoring item. Early on, this is the only reliable way to restore your energy. The minigame is flatly awful. It’s mechanically similar to Stardew Valley’s fishing minigame, but there’s no tutorial for what you’re controlling – the bar or the heart – and I never succeeded at it. Not once. I’m a G-Rank Monster Hunter. I was a Diablo nut. I know my inputs in action games. This isn’t a me problem. It’s a game issue, and it’s not the only place the game obscures what should be obvious.

Pulling the Loop Together — And Apart

Thus, the loop: Your perky protagonist goes to the groves, collecting everything they can along the way. The good news is that combat has a tweak where the plants themselves don’t hurt you. What drains your energy is failing to nourish a plant that’s already formed a link with you. So you’re motivated to engage everything you see and harvest what you find. You can leave via gates, or you might pass out, and both return you to Lavender’s garden, just with a varying amount of goodies. Simple. Right?

First issue: Lavender’s garden is cluttered, and your return will fluster you with 8+ exclamation points all over the map, doohickeys that you can feed your harvest to. This upgrades or unlocks things. Lavender’s garden is clear, but spread around it are the shrines, a crafting desk to make gifts, two different kinds of transport to unlock (not including the normal departure gates), and the skill grove, which is clunky. Instead of having a central tree to examine, upgrade, and set your skills, there’s a big tree and several little skill trees all over the place, all of which may be screaming exclamation marks at you.

You lose all sense of priority and start throwing your harvest around just to get the pop-ups to stop. Eventually, you’ll unlock something, like portals, that’ll let you shortcut some of your forest travel trips. Let’s go back to the forest, then.

The shortcut portals still need you to loop through one more time to unlock their other half, so now you have a bunch of dead doors cluttering your entry and exit points. So you just want to get through, but wait: You can’t run past plants to the exit; they’ll wither and cost you vital energy. So now you’re trudging because heaven forbid you make it to a boss stage in a weakened state because it will not be clear until your second or third attempt what a boss wants you to do to clear it.

So you trudge. And you get back to base. And the exclamation marks are screaming at you. And you still don’t have enough of anything to unlock a helpful upgrade, and you had no idea that some upgrades were hidden in the gift-making desk because whatever someone gave you is not in your handbook, and now you need more of everything. And maybe by now you’d yeet Lavender to the moon just to see an honest primary color.

Conclusion

Grimoire Groves has an active ad campaign that claims some of its early players are calling it a mix of Hades and Animal Crossing. It is neither of those things. The NPCs aren’t dynamic, they aren’t your neighbors, and they will become the source of your headaches. The combat isn’t Hades, because it quickly becomes onerous and grindy, and I felt zero joy when I beat the first boss. The combat isn’t smooth, either; aiming your spells is inexact, and only the lack of enemy damage keeps that from being a gamekiller itself.

This is a game I desperately looked forward to, and I work hard to be gentle in my reviews, because I can admire the effort. I wanted to be gentle this time, but my partner put his hand on my arm and pointed out that I literally screamed at my Steam Deck in frustration.

Grimoire Groves is polished and pretty, put together by people who clearly know what they’re doing, and yet somehow forgot to make the game loop fun to repeat. I cannot recommend it. It made me angry and unhappy to continue, and nothing was satisfying about the loop or its characters. I hope it will improve, but it’s going to take a lot to bring me around for another try.

Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It

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