More silliness from the world of Arum! The Grumpy Knight (and the crisis in Helena's Kingdom) was created in a very short space of time for a contest and so lacks a lot of polish. This is a review of the re-release.

Story 4/5
The plot centres around Elsa (the grump in question) trying to save a kingdom overrun by monsters.

What clearly stands out for me is her fully developed character - she has a distinct personality and has humourous interactions with the characters that she meets. This makes the game much more appealing to play and is a refreshing change from bland, stereotypical characters in other generic games.

Quite a few of the other game characters have personality but not all are fully developed - probably due to time constraints.

The game has 3 endings to encourage replayability: Normal, True and Joke. The true ending was reasonably satisfying but the joke ending crossed the line for my own personal tastes. The game went from silly to total bizarro-land (yes I know it's a joke but still...), others may find it funny.

Like the previous Arum game, the interaction between the characters is one of the highlights and is a big reason to keep playing.

Music 3.5/5
Reasonable BGM but nothing I would want to listen to repeatedly. The most memorable tracks for me were the grumpy knight theme and the north ice map.

Graphics 4/5
Nice title screen, custom battlers and battle backgrounds. The scantily clad enemies you battle fit the ridiculous tone of the game well.


Gameplay 4/5
The game veers on the easy side and shouldn't present a problem to RPG veterans apart from possibly the final boss.

There is an unusual online component which helpfully allows you to keep track of the achievements you have unlocked. You can also view other stats such as the percentage of players who preferred a particular character etc.

Typos are quite frequent in the game and really should have been picked up by testers (if there were any). Having the butler tell me "I've refilled your supplied" absolutely kills the game immersion and would have been easy to fix. (Stat booser anyone?).

Whilst we're on the subject of equippable stat boosters, each party member can only equip 1 booster but I ended up with a lot of them by the end of the game, so they felt a bit wasted. I also never found any reason to equip anything other than HP Boosts - the game had potential for strategy if it required you to use different stat boosts to beat different encounters.

Player choice should be meaningful so I found it really odd when I was asked if I wanted character X to join my party. There is no benefit at all to refusing so why give me the choice? It would have been better to just automatically add new characters to the party.

Every playable character (PC) has a different skill set and game mechanic in an attempt to add complexity to battles (and there are quite a number of PCs) - I found it OK but newbies might feel a bit overwhelmed by it. Unfortunately the characters don't feel balanced - some are definitely more powerful than others and it is possible to whizz through the game using the same party. I would have preferred it if certain bosses required you to use certain PCs in order to add a puzzle element to battles and encourage players to experiment with different parties.

Still, the game is short and filler-free which is always good.

Overall 4/5 good
A short and fun diversion but this hor d'oeuvre simply whets my appetite for the main course. When will we see a full Arum game? :P