Dazzling with an incredibly cute art style and promising a chill, low-stakes plant-parent experience, Grimoire Groves is an adventure aimed at the cosy gamer. It brings the mechanics of roguelikes such as Hades or Cult of the Lamb into the gardening scene, replacing the traditionally violent combat of such titles with softer actions like gathering fruits and planting seeds.
Featuring a trusty enchanted watering can, a network of spell-enhancing Wi-Fi-enabled mushrooms, and a charming cast of forest dwellers, this gentle title leans heavily and unapologetically on an aesthetic of sweet, whimsical bliss.
In Grimoire Groves, you play as apprentice witch Primrose, tasked with restoring the magical garden of her friend Lavender. To do this, she must set out into one of a few elemental forest biomes and gather seeds, fruits, and materials, which she can spend to grow plants and expand the garden. There’s some light narrative and a vague throughline with the plot, but most of the story exists solely as an excuse to send you out hunting for loot.
Some materials, such as stone and twigs, can be found scattered on the forest floor, but most will need to be harvested from plants. These take the form of what would be “enemies” in a traditional roguelike. Rather than attacking them, you cast magic to “feed” them. Once they’ve been well-fed, they’ll plant themselves in the earth and give up their fruits or seeds. It’s a cute reskin of the usual action combat mechanics and flows through to each facet of combat. Primrose loses stamina when touching a “damaging” plant, but they’re only ever trying to get close to her out of affection. It’s silly but wholesome.
Aesthetically, the areas Primrose explores are absolutely beautiful. Environments are lush and colourful, striking a perfect balance between cartoonish and pastel-core. Sprites are gorgeously detailed, and there’s a lovely softness to the game’s tone. The characters Primrose meets in her adventure feel suitably cute and quirky, while the plant pals she encounters are simply adorable. On a purely visual level, Grimoire Groves is a total delight.
Expanding the garden eventually gives you access to more forest biomes, as well as different magical abilities for Primrose to use on plants. These allow her to summon pools of plant-feeding energy or gusts of wind to knock plants away. In addition to your default dash, you’ll be relying on spells to crowd-control plants across the forest floor. This becomes especially important once you’ve unlocked plants of differing elements, since using the wrong elemental spell on a plant can cause Primrose to lose stamina.
As a roguelike, Grimoire Groves sends you into its procedurally generated forests regularly as part of its core loop. You’ll collect materials from plants, and return to Lavender’s garden to spend them, which in turn unlocks more plant types. Characters can also provide small fetch quests that unlock recipes for trinkets that boost your abilities.
Unfortunately, the core gameplay loop never really gets into a good rhythm. “Combat” is let down by the typically large “health pools” of most plants, in addition to Primrose’s spells generally feeling clunky to aim and awkward with their cooldown timings. Engaging large groups of plants gets insanely frustrating thanks to casino-style slot machine sound effects pinging off the wall each time a plant is fed. While some of the “boss fights” are pretty cool the first time, they’re not interesting enough to sustain multiple runs.
Grinding for resources is also handled uncomfortably – since your materials are turned into mulch each time you enter a forest, and materials spawn randomly, completing a fetch quest within a forest leaves you totally at the mercy of RNG. You can use mulch to play a crafting minigame with characters that you meet, but it sadly plays like a broken version of Stardew Valley fishing and usually results in wasted resources. The grinding issue is exacerbated by most garden expansions not feeling rewarding enough to justify the time investment required to unlock them.
Additionally, a few crashes during my playthrough set my progress back, making further grinding feel like even more of a chore. What results is a rather Sisyphean effort to have a nice time in this cosy world, totally at odds with its tone.
While I personally found the melange of systems in Grimoire Groves didn’t result in a satisfying and cohesive gameplay loop, it’s worth acknowledging that a core audience of cosy gamers may find its gameplay flaws easy to overlook and its design charming enough to sustain its lack of narrative. There is tonnes of content here to engage with for the right player, and its gorgeous cottage-core aesthetic is genuinely lovely – it’s difficult not to be charmed by a bunch of smiling plants coming to hug you.
Grimoire Groves is available now on PC.
About the Author
David McNamara
he/him or they/them
David is a proudly queer performing artist and software developer. He spends most of his downtime with a controller in his hands and a lazy beagle on his lap.
