Grimoire Groves Review

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 25 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote this achievement and plant info guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on “relaxed mode”
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: I have one bugged achievement, but this should be fixed in an update

Grimoire Groves is a roguelite where you go through the dungeon, aka The Forest, multiple times to unlock new stuff. Examples of new stuff are a fridge to save items, new spells, but most of all, new plants to unlock for future dungeon runs.

When you start the game, your main task is to clean up the garden. This remains the main task during the game, but you’ll get side quests to help clean up the garden. During a run in the dungeon, you can find new seeds to plant in your garden, so new enemies will appear in the dungeon, which will drop new resources to help you grow other plants and unlock new spells. The items in your garden that require items to unlock/upgrade are also kind of side quests. The main thing you’re doing in Grimoire Groves is going through the dungeon for resources and upgrading things. I sometimes felt stuck on a main part of the quest or felt like I didn’t make any progress, but that was never really the case. It just felt that way. When I returned to the game after a short break, I always felt productive again with the things I had unlocked or worked toward.

While playing through the game, you’ll unlock different plants. Each plant type has its own attack pattern. The combat is more challenging than I would have expected from such a cute-looking game, but gladly, it has an easy setting in which you don’t receive damage from enemy attacks. You also don’t have to kill every enemy. If you’re looking for a few specific items, you can run quickly past the plants you don’t need.

The two things that stood out to me the most were the boss fighters and how beautiful the resident areas ended up after completing them. There are only a handful of different bosses, but they all are quite different from the normal fights and the other boss fights. It sometimes takes a minute to figure out how to beat a boss, but there are always clues, and you’ll be able to figure it out. I found the last boss very challenging, even on the “relaxed difficulty”. The difficulty in that fight comes from the chaos, how long the fight is, and having to go through the whole dungeon again if you fail.

Grimoire Groves was so addictive to play. I sometimes just missed a deeper story, but working towards so many upgrades kept me going. I’m also very glad how detailed the in-game encyclopedia is. So you don’t have to remember which enemy drops which item and in which of the 4 different biomes to find that specific enemy.

Unlocking all the achievements in Grimoire Groves can be done in around 25 hours and it has no missable achievements. You can play the game on the easy difficulty and still unlock all the achievements. You’ll unlock most of the achievements on your way through the story. There are achievements for unlocking every plant, building a house for each forest resident and becoming best friends with all of them. I wouldn’t recommend giving the standard forest residents gifts, but I would recommend using those for the spirits and the worm in your garden. You can level up the forest residents with finishing their quests and also baking goods with them.

I give Grimoire Groves 4 out of 5 stars.

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