we are the innfolk

I finished playing Grime recently, and really enjoyed it. Grime's "catch" is that you are a being with a sort of black hole for a head, and your parry mechanic can sometimes become "absorb." That is, you siphon health away from enemies to yourself, and can heal while destroying them. I thought the game was beautifully designed, though the controls felt a little clunky and slow. But I have that gripe every time something isn't as snappy as Hollow Knight, and coming off playing Silksong, where Hornet's movement is extremely fast and responsive, Grime felt like it dragged horribly. I got used to it, however, and once I got the timing of the parry and absorb down, things improved significantly.

Grime has some intense platforming. Most of the really difficult stuff is optional - that is, you can complete the story and the game without certain bosses or platforming segments, but if you do, the game rewards your efforts with good upgrades and expanded abilities. One of the best weapons for a strength focused build is at the end of it's very own Path of Pain, whose pain is only relieved by the fact that there are several respawn points within the area, and dying doesn't knock you all the way back to the beginning.

My main complaint is that some abilities seem inconsistent. Sometimes I had a double air dash, sometimes I didn't. Double jump doesn't work *after* an air dash, but you can break it up into jump-dash-jump. Sometimes double jump seemed to work after pulling yourself towards an object, but at others it didn't. This may all be on me, rather than an actual game issue, but I have never claimed to be an elite gamer. I'm just very persistent.

There is a NG+ that I'm not exploring right now, but may in the future. I wanted to play Hades 2 and found that some of the controls are inverted between the two games, so I'd best play just one or the other. Grime's dash ability is on the same button as Hades' "cast," for example. I played a few hours of Hades last night and finally started remapping my brain to the new controls. Hades 2 is a delight if you liked the first game - I loved it. I finally got to the point of "okay, one more run before I shut down and go to bed," and of course I had my best run yet, clearing the first world and getting about halfway into the second one. It also has another pettable dog, as well as a frog you can talk to. The frog doesn't say anything back except "ribbit," but he's a cute little guy. Maybe he's a toad, I don't know. I like toads, too.

Hades 2 won a Steam award for "best on Steam Deck," so I'll probably load it onto mine. Grime ran decently on the Deck, but it really taxed the battery and got the unit hot. I found it was best to play while the Deck was plugged in if I didn't want to absolutely exhaust my battery.

Oh yeah, and Melinoe addresses the voiceover guy, calling him "Homer," so now we know.