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Considering all the unfortunate launch issues that Grimlight has been mired in, I was pretty surprised to be able to play the game after some time since the shift to open beta. That said, the Asia server was the one that had been experiencing the bulk of the problems and it being clearer now is likely due to a lower population, so I would advise not to flood it just yet until at least next week pending official announcements on server stability. The official Discord channel has been addressing issues the best they can, so for that, much kudos for their efforts.
With that out of the way, let’s see what the game offers at this stage.
PRESENTATION
Grimlight uses both static sprites, Live2D art and little chibi models across the game, with characters voiced in Korean. The art style is quite the highlight of the game, the ‘soft’ lighting adding to the ‘story book’ style theme I get from the game. The general interface is easy to grasp, though the actual navigation can probably be improved.
The story has an interesting hook: you play the “Dreamer”. You meet Aurora who seems to know you from perhaps another time, but your ‘reunion’ is cut short as hostiles swarm towards you. You get transported away, with a promise to meet again. The hostiles are known as Dreamless and certainly seem to be persistent in standing in your way. However, as the Dreamer, you have the power to call on heroes from Memory Shards and push back against whatever darkness that seems to be threatening the land.
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay is not very complicated: you have a certain amount of deployment points and you’re able to fill up the slots on the left with your squad at the bottom of your screen if you have enough points to do so. They will then march to the right of the screen, attacking automatically. After some time, they can also unleash their active skills.
As you might expect, formation and exploiting weaknesses will be important to clear battles, from sniping out certain enemy types to preventing your backline from getting hit. If a slot is left empty, that gives the enemy free pass to beeline to the back, so having a “blockade” would be most appreciated by your squishy units.
Raising your characters involve the following:
- Levelling them up, which doesn’t happen in battle
- Raising their level caps
- Four equipment slots that can be further ascended and refined, with set bonuses available
- Duplicates to unlock more nodes that give stats at random, can be rerolled (Awakening)
- Bonus stat percentage increases with “books” (Potential)
- Levelling skills up
I think the stamina – Keys in this game – is kind of restrictive since basically everything uses Keys, the resource gain doesn’t seem very much for the cost and the first level cap increase materials only become available somewhat late into the game where the recommended power requirements start to ramp up, more so for Challenge stages. You don’t have that much deployment points either to try brute force it with more units and equipment only drops from the last stage of the Path of Midnight Tears per strata, which itself is locked behind story progression.
Grimlight does have some other nice quality of life stuff where you can “sweep” battles without needing skip tickets, though you can’t outright skip them as you still need to progress the one battle to get the rewards for the number of quests you decided to sweep. It’s easy enough to let the auto-battle take the wheel, or you could place down your preferred units before hitting the auto to ensure your composition is in place.
The Adventurer’s Guild works as a little dorm area you can decorate with shiny things, claim some materials from and see the little chibis of your faves walk around. PVP comes in the form of the Arena with seasons.
Microtransactions include the usual monthly pass, packs of goodies including one for weekly refreshes of summoning currency (not for the limited banners) and a premium battle pass offering a 5-star weapon in the paid track (for the season at time of writing).
GACHA
At 1.5% for a 5-star character, it’s on the lower side of the spectrum. It does have a guarantee system, though only for the weapons and the limited-time banner. At the very least, I’m glad it doesn’t use a shard system for these low rates. The guarantee is separate between the limited character banner and the weapon banner.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
For the art alone, I think Grimlight is one that will attract a lot of people, as I would assume from the flood leading to the server disruptions. Gameplay wise, there’s a little strategy twist that encourages a little more tweaking rather than bulldozing with sheer star power alone. With the open beta giving the development team a bit more time to polish things up and taking in feedback before a proper, hopefully with less servers on fire launch, this could be a gem yet.
