Words have weight, which is why I swing them around with reckless abandon. I’m not sure that’s what Great God Grove is about unless you only t?ake it literally. It’s m??ore about identity, authority, communication, and misunderstanding.

It’s the follow-up to Smile For Me by Limbolane. But while the two games have similarities, you might miss the relation just by looking at it. One game has you interred in an asylum, while the other has you fixing the relation??ships of the gods. However, what they have in common is head nods and fixing people.

Great God Grove (Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Limbolane
Publisher: LimboLane, Fellow Traveller
Released: November 15th, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Great God Grove puts you in the boots of a Godpoke, which is, as far as I can tell, a sort of courier. To be honest, I’m not clear on a few concepts her??e. For all I know, a Godpoke might just be someone who wears a poncho. You arrive at the eponymous grove just in time to see the gods close a giant rift?? in the sky that threatens to end the world. The problem is that the gods aren’t entirely interested in saving the world. They’re far too wrapped up in their own problems.

Previous to your arrival, the last messenger of the gods, the mysterious King, sent letters out to all the gods. The letters are obvious attempts to drive wedges between them, but as King had always been a trusted friend and reliable enough to be elected to become the next god, they took those words at face value. Now, nothing is right in the grove de??spite being a crucial time for the whole world.

Before you even get to the grove, King’s trusty mail cannon, the Megapon, lands directly in your lap. With this device, you can suck the words out of one person’s mouth and sl?ap them in the face of another. Or just right back at them. That happens sometimes.

Being the wise person you are (or maybe just because it’s a linear narrative), you set to work righting King’s wrong. Immediately, you’re deputized by Inspekta, the God of Leadership, to help their lackeys, the Bizzyboys, figure out what happened to King and why they decided to hurt everyone’s feelings. However, the leader of the ??Bizzyboys, Capochin, is only out to please his boss, while the?? rest of the members are completely incompetent and hapless. So, it all comes down to you.

Largely, Great God Grove resembles a point-and-click adventure game. You can’t suck up any sentence or gr?ouping of words you want; only specific, highlighted things that characters say can go in your Megapon. In this way, they work like any item in somet??hing like Secret of Monkey Island. You find hints in the words of the people you’re talking to and deliver something that will get them to perform some task for you, even if that’s just moving out of the way.

There’s a bit of a learning curve??. For the first area, I wasn’t picking up on the cues, but after the second, I was able to proceed with some expedience. I didn’t get hung up very often, but I have to wonder if that’s going to be everyone’s experience. Great G??od Grove has an unusual design language built around its central hook, and I’m not sure if gaming literacy will be as important here as actual literacy. I’m not sure if every player can adjust, or maybe I’m the odd one because I had some issues in the first area. I can only speak to my own experience, though, and in my experience, I didn’t have much of a problem for most of the game.

Each area of the grove is home to on??e or two gods. In each one, King has spread some sort of misinformation to throw things into chaos, and your overall goal is to sort things out to restore the status quo. Sounds easy, but being an adventure game, it takes more than an apology to work things out.

What really elevates Great God Grove above a typical adventure game is an abundance of style. It mixes 2D characters and objects with a 3D world Paper Mario-style. It’s based around Day Lane’s distinctive, sketchy, expressive style. While animation is s?parse, each character has a massive range of poses and emotions that they transition to each new w?indow of dialogue. It can be quite captivating.

Many of the gods are rendered in full?? 3D, but they’re styled in such a way that it can be hard to tell. Like the 2D folks, the gods spring from pose to pose, with more traditional animation thrown in occasionally to spice things up.

There are also live-action puppet vignettes that you can w?atch for not much reason aside from enrichment. They generally just involve the Bizzyboys giving advice and some background information about what’s going on in the world. As it turns out, I’m really into puppets eating sandwiches. 

There isn’t much out that that looks quite like Great God Grove. The style is executed so consistently?? and with so much blunt-force pizzazz that it’s incredible that just a handful of people put the whole thing together. There are so many facets of its visual style that look as though they would be very difficult to execute, so the fact that they didn’t choose an easier, more co?nventional route is impressive. It pays off because, if absolutely nothing else, the way this game looks will be seared into your eyeholes.

Great God Grove has a lot to say about identity and the way people will stomp on others? just for recognition. The gods themselves aren’t much different than ordinary people. They just exist on a less accessible plane of existence. As such, even though you can walk up and talk to them, their followers seem to just believe what they hear and speculate on what they might be thinking, which often is what leads to miscommunication. Misinformation is rife, and people take advantage of that.

Humans seem hardwired to climb. There’s a fear that our lives will be meaningless or forgotten, so we strive for recognition. And to secure our recognition, we’ll often stomp down the people beneath us. We yearn to wear the stomping boots, and a decent person can turn awful the moment they put them on. You face a lot of that in Great God Grove.

At the same time, it’s a very optimistic game. With your intervention, the troublemakers you meet see the error in their ways and?? express a desire to atone for their actions. Call me cynical, but I find most people are more likely to become defensive when faced with the consequences of their actions. People dig their stomping boots in and seek justification for what they’ve done. Maybe I just need a stronger word cannon.

In terms of gameplay, I could honestly take or leave Great God Grove. It has great pacing and a unique approach to the adventure genre, but I find the situations in which it’s applied generally unexciting. Not overly mundane, but I think with urgent focus on the threat and more dangerous situations, the dialogue would have more of a chance to sh??ine. But it already shines pretty bright?ly.

Great God Grove is an immensely polished and precisely executed game, and that’s the most impressive part about it. Its pacing and aesthetic are finely honed and there’s nary a loose thread to be found. A bit more punch and the narrative would be perfect, but it presents a good a??mount of depth to sink into. It also features puppets gnawing on a gigantic hoagie, and really, what more can you ask for?

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Good news, chums, the release of Great God Grove is right around the corner. It’s the sort-of follow-up of Smile For Me by LimboLane. It has a lot of the same good stuff, like puppets and flat characters. It also has jokes if your ?sense of humor has?n’t fallen off.

It’s pretty different, though. It’s still a joy-maker adventure game about helping people out, but Great God Grove bases its puzzles around sucking the words out of someone’s mouth and firing them at someone else. It’s a uniq?ue twist on an old formula, and I’m not totally sure how I feel about it, so I’m going to work through my emotions the way I usually do: posting questionable content online.

In Great God Grove, you are placed in the boots of a Godpoke, which is a cross between a messenger of the ??gods and a cowboy. Now, I’m going to admit that I don’t fully understand all the details of the story here, so things are going to get a little dicey.

You’re on the trail of King, the previous messenger of the gods. King seemingly became fed up with the g??ods, mailed each of them a nasty message, and left the pantheon �and the world with it �in complete disarray. This is a problem because a massive rift has opened up in the sky. Apparently, these rifts open every 33 years and threaten to swallow up the world. To close it, the gods have to work together to pull it shut. Unfortunately, in the wake of King’s nastiness, ?the gods don’t feel like doing much, let alone cooperating.

The rift also has the power to elevate a single human to godhood, which is where I start to get confused. King is apparently a god, so under his godhood, he was still delivering messages? Under normal circumstances, why does it take so long for the gods to close the rift? How does a human have time to enter it? Does something like this happen every time, where a mortal has to convince the gods to cooperate? Did?? the game explain this to me, and I just couldn’t grok it through the cut??esy dialogue? I don’t know.

The important parts are clear however: King was nice and now they’re not. The gods are all so absorbed in their own heartbreak that they aren’t even thinking about closing the rift, leavin??g the world on the precipice of disaster. As a godpoke, you need to use your power over words to restore order and close the rift.

You’re equipped with a, uh, thing�A suck thing. It has a name, it’s, er�Right, Meg?apon. Every once in a while, someone will say something perforated. There will be little dots around it, letting you suck it into your Megapon. You can then find someone in the environment who says something like, “Ooo, I wish someone would give me a fat compliment,�and you throw it at them, a?nd they’ll hopefully react.

As I said, it’s a unique approach to the adventure game formula, but it also has the same problem that classic point-and-clicks had. When you’re not certain what to ?do, your main course of action might become just rubbing phrases on people until one of them reacts. I ran into one early in the second area that had me scratching my head. I wound up needing to use a word given by a dog on a cow, then using a word from the cow on my target. Looking back, there were certainly hints as to what the solution was, but I can also see why I was confused.

And while it’s certainly novel to use phrases to solve puzzles, I’m not sure they’re much better than items. And trust me, they feel exactly like items. You can carry five at a time, so you just have a pocket full of sentences. On the one hand, it’s easier for an adventure game to give you a hint when the solution always involves talking to someone. On the othe??r hand, it’s not as exciting as carrying a ha?mster around in your pocket.

It’s worth noting that you sometimes do just pick up regular items. It’s not very common in the demo I played, but maybe it is later in the game? I’m kind of feeling that it won’t be, and maybe that’s ??okay. I was really getting into the flow of things toward the end.

While I may be a bit iffy on the approach to puzzles, it’s hard not to love the art style. It still uses a simplistic, angular style similar to Scott C.’s work on Psychonauts or even just simply �0s cartoons. It feels more naturally executed than Smile For Me, which I already found great. However, I’ve found the art to be incredibly consistent and cohesive for both games. It blends well with the 3D backgrounds and effects. Whenever something looks a bit? off, it’s usually easy to belie??ve it was intentional.

Every once in a while, you can view explainer videos that feature real flesh-and-felt puppets. They’re pretty great, but they clearly haven’t helped me enough. They’re also complete asides that you can’t suck on, but watching?? two puppets chew on the same hoagie is worth the ?viewing.

The writing is charming and packed with wordplay, but it’s also maybe a smidge too much. Few folks will straight-talk with you, making you try to glean the communicated information from between cutesy intentional misspellings. The names given are often unique non-names �er, nononyms �and I already can’t remember people’s names at the best of t??imes. Or their faces. Or past encounters, most of the time. So, remembering who Sirena is just makes things tougher. So, it’s a me problem, maybe, but thank you for naming the baker “Bayker.�I think I can remember that one.

I was given access to a slightly longer version than the demo that will be released as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest. As it stands, I don’t really solidly know what I think about Great God Grove. I’m told I played about 40% of the overall game, so there’s a lot of time for me to start clicking with the things that haven’t yet clucked. Even towards the end of the dem?o, I was starting to get a better feel for how to overcome its word puzzles.

And I kind of f??eel like something is still lurking?? under the surface. A great reveal, twist, or dash of darkness. I don’t think all its cards are on the table, and at least with the demo, I really want to see what else it has up its sleeve. It’s out on November 15, so at least I don’t have to wait terribly long to find out.

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