Goblet Grotto

99 is a number that’s respectful on its own, but is typically viewed as an insignificant number, a last step on a way to 100. Unless, of course, you are limited to just two digits, in which case it’s the largest number you could possibly operate with. I decided such duality would best fit Goblet Grotto, a game by thecatamites that is more impressive then Space Funeral in some ways (starting from the fact it’s Unity and is in 3D), but will likely always remain in its shadow. Moreover, I have played that game long before I was ever aware RMN exists: it was both one of the first freeware games I played, and one of the first for which I created a TVTropes page. I suppose writing this review here would simply finish the cycle - for a game that’s all about cycles.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

Have you heard of the recent Drawn to Death? This kinds of hand-drawn pencil-scribble graphics is what you see here. Usually, each area has a dominant colour theme, but that’s practically all the cohesion you could expect. A lot of the stuff in the game is not even technically 3-dimensional, but more akin to life-sized cardboard cutouts. They are obviously not animated much either, besides the jerky attacks, which are often accompanied by the white “speed blur” effect. Many attacks and movements of any kind are silent as well, and there’s generally little environmental sound. The soundtrack fits the quality of the areas, I suppose.

Gameplay

The part about jerky attack animations is actually quite important: it means that the enemies have no recovery animation between attacks, and once they get into attack range, it would take them no time at all to spam-attack you to death. However, this is countered both by your frog protagonist having slightly greater reach with his weapon, and being capable to insta-kill nearly everything. As such, enemies are basically the same, no matter how esoteric they might be on the outside (there are crazed motorcycle racers, rolling firemen,"Concerned Sailors" and “Kings”, to name just a few). Some can take more then one hit, and a few are outright invincible, but there are no other differences to name: I don’t even think there’s something as basic for a 3D real-time action as a ranged enemy. I still remember how a few years ago I used to fantasize how much better the game would have been if your character could block (his model even has a shield that’s just attached to his arm, unused!), kick and have a strong attack, and enemies like Cavemen could also do these things, as well as have more variable movement patterns. I even wrote a bit of that down, but I'm pretty sure I lost that file for good, and either way, it wouldn't matter - not unless the creator some day decides to make fun of remakes/remasters with hypothetical "Goblet Grotto HD" or something.

Outside of combat, you can converse with whatever sentient beings there to get their single message in return (so, no different from most rmk games.) Sometimes, they will attack you only after you talk to that. Sometimes, there’ll be a yes/no question, which at best changes whether or not the asker will attempt to attack you and die meaninglessly. You also have the mechanics of eating, resting, and praying, which are similarly rudimentary. Resting is basically the only way your character restores health. It can be used practically indefinitely, and restores it nearly instantaneously .The only food available is meat, which drops from nearly all biological enemies (an advantage of having a bipedal frog character is that eating humans is not cannibalism). Not eating for a while results in the character reduced to a crawl on the ground, which is obviously annoying, though I don’t think it ever led to death on its own. Prayer can also address a crawling state, and praying at certain times can also reward you with an extra goblet, the currency of sorts that gives the game its name and that your frogman supposedly seeks.

Storyline

Like in Space Funeral and catamites’ other works, you have a world that’s styled to be as esoteric as possible. The “Grotto” is an utterly insane mash-up of areas that make little sense on their own, yet interconnect in often crazy manners. The early, blue-tinted grotto (2nd area, after the tiny stretch of forest with a couple of useless merchants and some wolves that surrounds the entrance from the outside) already has paths to several varying areas. Probably the most impressive one is a hatch you open in order to fall into the world of an endless motorcycle race, where new racers will constantly be falling from the sky to keep a constant flow, and the path is long even for them, let alone for your pelabyte pedestrian who has to avoid getting in their way. At its end, there are only armed creatures that’ll kill them all. I suppose this area is thecatamites’ sorta-commentary on the racing games. Another area that explicitly references a game genre is a world of steampunkish dwarves that are mostly unaggressive (though same can’t be said about their automatons) and who are busy with the RTS pursuits of base-building, resource-collecting and vehicle-creating. (One of their super-vehicles can also be entered, which shifts the game into first person, unlike pretty much all other areas.) However, interacting with other places’ inhabitants can also occasionally reveal some 4th-wall–breaking reference, some prompt to look up parts of game guide that don’t exist, or tutorials for the mechanics that are very clearly not there (trading is one example. Another is a tutorial for dancing at the ball where you can’t do anything but your usual actions.)

Apparently, it’s supposed to evoke a world of a large “ultimate game” that could have included everything game design can do, but was left as a hollow shell of its ambitions. It doesn’t even have proper saving: attempting to reload a save made past the entry blue area or thereabouts lands you into a hellish version of the famous “maze” Windows screensaver. Then again, perhaps inability to genuinely save is also intended to evoke Nethack (which this game can probably match in scope, even if all of it is preset.) In particular, heaven-like area is populated by nothing but snakes, which might be a Bible thing, but could also reference an infamous angelic enemy in that game. (That area also has tons of skeletons invading to wage war on these inhabitants.) Another notable moment is a crystal area, where you are allowed to marry one of several “daughters” of the crystal emperor (or whatever) there. In what might be the only conscious decision with any weight in the game, said princess will continue to float near you at all times afterwards, and is even occasionally helpful, in that enemies may get stuck up against her immobile floating form, allowing you to quickly slash them to death. Then, there even some places and areas where you’ll reach the end(ing) – places where the game becomes impossible to leave (not to be confused with falling infinitely, which can also happen) and you are presented with “Thanks for playing!” message.

Other then all these small and semi-contained quirks and area narratives, Goblet Grotto does include a central theme of sorts. While the combat is, at least to my mind, inexcusably basic, the other 3 mechanics are fine the way they are, because they mainly exist as a way of delivering messages to the player. There are the things accompanying prayer, the descriptions of meat you ate, the dreams you had while asleep, etc. (These all show up in a textbox to the side, displacing whatever area description there normally is.) As you keep playing though, there’s one very definite drift in the content of all three message types. It’s kind of like the sanity systems of some games, except that it’s permanent. I probably shouldn’t spoil what exactly is happening, because the joke is rather simple and wouldn’t work nearly as well if you were aware of it. Even so, it’s still rather disturbing when you first see it play out over the decent-sized run.

Conclusion

So, this is Goblet Grotto, in case you haven’t played it already. It technically has a lot of content for a free game, but the quality of it is certainly questionable. Pretty much the main thrill is in trying to discover all the areas and messages, and in spite of the often-unexciting gameplay. Eventually, you are likely to start wandering in circles, wondering if you saw everything yet, or not, and whether or not it matters. I’m not entirely sure about that either, which is one reason (of several) I’m leaving this review unscored. It’s very much a weird game, though same is true of every game thecatamites makes, I suppose. If you liked his most famous one, Space Funeral, and want more weirdness, and don't care whether it comes in 2D or 3D, or whether the underlying mechanics are sound, then there's no reason not to play it.