Grist of Flies

Hamburger Mathematics

I've used the hamburger analogy here before. I've used it often. But, because it's such a wonderfully simple metric for measuring a game on, I'll give this dead horse a few more kicks to see if it might yet rise.

Imagine you're in a restaurant. Imagine you're there with friends, and you've ordered a hamburger. Dinner lasts about an hour, with good conversation, and by the end of it you feel satisfied.

If a game can pack the same amount of enjoyment into an hour, it's worth its hamburger price: the degree of happiness that you would get spending your time elsewhere, doing something else you really enjoy.

Grist is worth its hamburger price.

Clocking in at a little over an hour, with boatloads of custom assets, a comfortingly retro visual aesthetic, and razor-tight balancing, Grist would be a lovely proof of concept if it weren't also a great game. It has plot, distinct characterization, interesting custom options for your parties, plenty of narrative room to expand into, and more PCs than I've seen in 50+ hour AAA releases.

Shin Megami Manstorm

At its core, Grist is about finding your way to safety through a labyrinth of Persona-esque monsters. Orbiting around the simple, meaty core are swarms of playable characters. You find them everywhere. You find them in storerooms, you find them in gunshops, you find them up ladders, and you use them all to pad out your burgeoning mob of survivalists as you steamroll through progressively larger batches of demons.

Each recruit is a complete character, with a (very small) narrative arc, party interactions, and a host of skills divided between multiple equippable roles. Together, your men are a blizzard of options, special attacks, stat buffs, and synergies. It would all be disorienting, if the writing wasn't also quite good. The human mind doesn't particularly like to relate to twenty distinct people at the same time, but Grist pushes exactly that on it. And, more than it ought to, Grist succeeds.

By the end of the story, I felt myself relating not just to the characters but also the narrator, and chomping at the bit for more.

People As Weapons, Units As People

It's amazing what a little bit of word swapping can do.

Technically, Grist is a three character game. Each character has about five equippable slots, all of which moderate the character's stats and which moves they can deploy with their two actions per turn.

However, those characters are not people. Their equippable items are. And, thanks to the constant character development tacked at the ends of combats and during optional recruitment scenes, you empathize with those people-items and not with the units they make up.

To put it another way, Grist is a game in which you have more emotional investment in Bronze Sword than in Bob the Fighter. This is because Bob is a component being, made up of Bronze Sword, Mercury Pendant, and Copper Shield. If you were to swap out Copper Shield for Tin Foil Hat, it would still be Bob, but something much more significant than his statline would have been changed.

I love this. Unabashedly, without reservation, and from the bottom of my narrativist heart. It made me think every time I opened up the menu, and not just about how to solve the puzzle of combat but about the human element involved.

Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Heart

For me, the key element in design has always been passion. If a creator enjoys their work, that shows through. Always. The technical elements might not be there. The narrative elements might not be there. The spelling and grammar might not even be there, but the enthusiasm shines out like a guiding beacon, drawing the player on.

Grist has that passion, but it also has outstanding design and excellent writing supporting it. It executes clever twists on a familiar formula, and it feels like it would be perfectly at home visually amidst a bunch of releases for the DS and PSP.

While I was writing this review, I found myself fishing for reasons not to give it a five, and the best I could come up with was "but I don't usually do that." That would have been an exceptionally lazy excuse. For me, Grist's only failing was that it was too short.

At an hour of consistent joy, it was well worth its hamburger price.