Great God Grove review

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Divinely quirky adventure in a charming, bizarre world where communication is king

Mail delivery isn’t exactly the most riveting concept for the backbone of a game. Maybe a side quest or two at most, but to have an entire game based around sending messages sounds like an easy recipe for boredom, if left in the wrong hands. It’s a good thing then that developer LimboLane (Smile for Me) is no stranger to bizarre gameplay hooks, and Great God Grove oozes with charm to the point that you’ll largely forget that you’re a glorified mail carrier. With a memorable cast of characters to accompany all the dialogue-based puzzles along with incredible art direction, this game delivers a unique and fun journey as a messenger to the gods.

The story begins with you waking up on a small boat, where you are informed by the captain that you are en route to your vacation at the grove, where the Festival of the Rift is about to begin. A great hole in the sky opens every thirty years, and each time the gods who live in the grove all work together to close the rift and postpone an apocalypse that would destroy all life on Earth. At least, that’s what would be happening if their divine messenger King hadn’t decided to send a flurry of upsetting messages to all the gods after she was elected to godhood herself. Now, all of the deities are in disarray and in desperate need of a new messenger who can help untangle this mess before the rift expands and brings forth the end of times. Thankfully, right after you learn about all this, a mythical item literally falls from the sky and crashes in front of you: a legendary mail-delivery cannon, the Megapon. This was used by King to send messages between the gods before she went rogue, and now it is in your possession. 

Attached to the Megapon is a cryptic letter stating the device was taken by the God of Leadership, Inspekta, and tossed from the top of the grove’s spire to ensure no other hurtful messages are sent by King. Shortly after arriving, you’ll meet with Inspekta and discover that in King’s absence they have taken up the responsibility of delivering mail to the gods (and they are very, very behind on mail delivery). With you being a mere human in possession of the Megapon, Inspekta deems you an honorary “Godpoke” and asks you to be their right-hand deputy in mail delivery and professional sleuthing, solving the mystery of what made King decide to disrupt communications between the gods and avert the oncoming apocalypse. Seems easy enough, right?

Gameplay in Great God Grove typically consists of you, Godpoke, walking around a 2.5D plane as a 2D cartoon-styled character viewed from slightly overhead. The grove’s inhabitants are stylized to look something like the figments in Psychonauts if they were fully outlined and colored in. As Godpoke, you resemble a small cartoon cowboy, with your new trusty Megapon megaphone/mail launcher at your side. You traverse the environment using WASD/arrow key controls, with the ability to run by holding Shift down. (Full gamepad support is included as well.) But the main focus here is undoubtedly your Megapon’s ability to suck in and spit out text boxes spoken by the characters you encounter. 

A right mouse-click will suck in anything outlined by a dotted orange line in the world – on rare occasions these will be actual items, but typically you will be speaking with characters and waiting for a specific line of dialogue that is surrounded by an orange dotted line. When these pop up, you can then take that line of dialogue (or item) and add it to your inventory. You can carry up to five different phrases and/or items at once, to then use on others to help you accomplish your goals. These aren’t just words but actual phrases still attributed to whichever character spoke them. They appear in a bar you can easily access at any time with a left-click, and each phrase appears with a small icon showing the face of its original speaker. You can use this to your advantage if you need something to be spoken by a particularly imposing character, such as if you need the authoritative word of a god to boss someone around rather than having some random person’s phrase in the hopes of getting them to perform a task. 

To launch an item or phrase at a character, you can aim with the mouse and left-click, which will fire the currently selected item from your inventory at whomever you’re facing. If it elicits a response, the item/phrase will disappear from your inventory. If you try but it doesn’t make contact with a character, it will reappear in the world as a floating disembodied text box for roughly fifteen seconds so you’ll have plenty of time to suck it back in with Megapon. Godpoke does not speak at all personally, so all of your interactions will be handled using dialogue spoken by others in the grove. Not all dialogue boxes available for use by the Megapon are required to progress through the game, and all the ones you gather won’t elicit a response from every character. But there’s a wide array of character responses that you can play around with and use to experiment, even if just for fun. There is one line of dialogue in particular that tells whoever you’re speaking with to get a haircut – and lo and behold, whenever you launch it at someone, their model in-game will suddenly be bald for a short period of time. There’s nothing to be gained story-wise from it, but it’s in interactions like this that the unique humor in Great God Grove shines. 

Great God Grove

Genre:	Comedy, Fantasy
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Religion/Occult
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Quest
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

It's unfortunate then that while the dialogue-based puzzles are novel in concept and execution, these puzzles are rarely challenging and can generally be figured out with a small amount of trial and error if you decide you want to just throw answers at a wall until something sticks. There are a few sections where you will have to suck in items and/or dialogue boxes while being knocked around by adversaries, but they don’t damage you and typically will just cause you to miss a shot and have to recapture whatever phrase or item you’re trying to use. The puzzles being a cakewalk isn’t a major issue when the adventure is so incredibly charming, but it would be nice to see the studio innovate on the conceit with more challenge in future projects. There is also no way to fast-forward through a conversation in order to skip directly to an interactive dialogue box if you need to re-use a same line multiple times in a puzzle – you will have to repeatedly click through line by line until you see the one surrounded by the orange dashed line. It’s a minor annoyance as you usually only need to use dialogue boxes once, but it would have been useful to have a skip function to proceed directly to the desired highlighted box.

While traversing the overworld is handled entirely in 2.5D, whenever you travel into the realm of a god you will suddenly view the game from a first-person perspective, with all of the gods rendered entirely in 3D with 2D facial features. All of the same controls for the Megapon apply when speaking with gods – you can suck in phrases and spit out any you come by the same way you can with any of the mortal 2D characters. But by having the deities appear so different than the mortal denizens of the grove, it makes for a clever contrast in visual style and adds a sense of the divine nature of these godly beings. 

The sound design in Great God Grove is wonderfully charming – while nothing is said aloud in the typical sense, each character has their own way of speaking through sound effects matching their text appearing on-screen. One god's dialogue is accompanied by a rattling akin to bones clacking together, for example. This individual distinctiveness extends to the written dialogue as well, since many characters speak in delightfully quirky mannerisms – such as Inspekta using various nonsense spellings of terms like “yew” rather than “you” and “right-hand yam” rather than “right-hand man.” This works beautifully to provide personality to the many different characters of the grove without needing a massive voice cast, and it was a genuine treat to see how each inhabitant would communicate in their own unique way. 

As the newly minted Godpoke, you will be traveling through different zones where each of the gods call home - from the soggy oceanside cove where you begin your journey, to a rustic farming village at harvest time, to a glitzy hilltop where artists and performers practice their craft. Every location you visit is wildly different from the last, and each is themed around the particular god and/or gods who call that location their own. The musical score follows suit whenever you visit a new location – you’ll be accompanied by a large variety of musical styles, from whimsical synths to the rhythmic twangs of a banjo to dramatic piano solos. Every one of these distinctive zones is self-contained, and the game progresses from one to the next in a linear fashion, contributing to the game’s ease but preventing any excessive backtracking. 

The eclectic cast had me glued to my seat during Great God Grove’s entire 6-8 hour runtime. I wanted to meet every character and exhaust every line of dialogue I could find, because everyone you meet in the grove is wonderfully unique and bizarre in their own way. Characters you meet early on will grow and change along with the events unfolding, and it was a treat to see them evolve in ways that genuinely surprised me throughout. One literal example of this is the Bizzyboys, Inspekta’s loyal crew of underlings who report to their smug boss, Capochin. The Bizzyboys are awarded additional letters in their name whenever they receive an accolade from Capochin for an investigating job well done. So when you first meet these characters, they’ll have a couple letters each in their name label – i.e. Al, Gr, or P. But as the game goes on, you’ll talk to the same characters only now their name might be Alex – or in P’s case, still just P. 

I would be remiss not to mention the impressive diversity in cultures, gender identities, and character designs in the game as well. It’s all handled very matter-of-factly, with characters just existing in this world and accepting each other for who they are. It’s refreshing to have such a wide range of representation in a cast of over sixty, and for it to feel so natural in its implementation. This is a game about repairing friendships and spreading love, after all. Through soothing broken hearts and helping others express their feelings or clear up misunderstandings, your goal is to bring the gods back together to (hopefully) save the world and avert the apocalypse. By the time the game’s finale played out and the credits began to roll, I was legitimately floored by the powerful ending and how much I had grown to love the characters and world they call home.

Final Verdict

Great God Grove is a joy to play from start to finish. The Megapon lends itself to some wacky dialogue-based puzzle solutions that always put a smile on my face, even if the brain teasers didn’t always prove to be particularly challenging. The huge cast of memorable characters immediately won me over with their zany dialogue and heartfelt story moments, and the many different zones of this unique world display an impressive amount of variety. It’s funny, it’s charming, and encourages you to experiment and explore to get the most out of it. You may begin the game as a lowly tourist, but with a divine mail-blasting device at your side, you’re sure to end this tale as a rootin’ tootin’ Godpoke – and it’s a pair of boots well worth stepping into.

Sam played Great God Grove on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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