News > American McGee on Grimm
May 30, 2007
Few details have surfaced thus far about the upcoming game, American McGee's Grimm. We know it's from the same designer that brought us Alice, and we know it is based on Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Now, we know a bit more. In a recent interview, McGee revealed a few details about the structure and content of the game, as well as some unique gameplay mechanics that will be implemented:
"The game is comprised of 24 individual episodes. Each episode revolves around a single fairy tale in need of rescuing from political correctness - the player needs to re-introduce the original darkness to each tale. This is accomplished through a series of mini-games, usually involving a single, simple game mechanic, such as flying, driving, sneaking, herding, etc. The mission goals are simple: "Make the wife a widow" - and the obstacles involved are character driven, interesting, and often darkly funny."
"We’ve invented a fighting mechanic in keeping with our literary theme – Words as Weapons. The player can literally pluck words like “burn,” “fly,” or “expand” from the world and throw these as weapons – with self evident effect. From mission to mission the available word weapons change – we’re taking full advantage of the small scale of each mission and the large number of possible effects all these word weapons can have. The variety in gameplay and the player’s ability to transform the world and characters in it should be huge."
Now that second part sounds very cool. As someone who enjoys using the English language, the idea of defeating enemies with words is very inviting. I have to wonder, though, what does "pluck words from the world" actually mean? Will there be a sea of words floating around the sky, which can be grabbed when needed? Or will the player have an arsenal of words at the ready? The way I imagine it would be similar to the figments in Psychonauts - the lingering words creating an atmosphere around the game's action.
In any case, I'm sure Grimm will be an interesting experience.
*Eddie R Inzauto - Senior Editor, GameWad.com
