Sometimes Grunn has you cutting hedges and grass with shears. Sometimes it has you finding unsettling things better left unseen.
You’ve been hired to tend the gardens around a nice house. You’re not welcome in said house, though, but you get a shed to live in that’s not too bad. However, you don’t always seem to have the tools you need. Your boss isn’t around, so you’ll just have to poke around the area and the nearby town to see if you can scrounge up what you need. Maybe if you ask the right person, ythey can steer you towards fulfilling your duties so you can keep your handsome living shack.
Except the people in the town seem a bit…off. In fact, the entire area does, the more you explore it. Reality feels a bit slippery. You find yourself in all manner of strange, surreal places. The world keeps opening up to locations you feel you really shouldn’t be exploring. And there’s also way too many garden gnomes. This game does an exceptional job of slowly dialing up this sense of unease. I don’t know if I would call it fear (although it did make me feel a nameless dread many times). It feels more like you’re witnessing a disturbing shift in the world. That there are unseen things that have always been around you, and that realization is breaking a comforting stabilty you didn’t know you’d always clung to.
Grunn rewards curiosity, offering more to see as you expand your knowledge of how it works across playthroughs. If you can be in the right place at the right time, you can get see more of this world’s truths. No matter what you feel about the answers, though, Grunn has much to show to the curious. As to whether you live through it…we’ll see.
You are definitely not being paid enough for this yard work, though.
Grunn will be made available today on Steam.