Grim Trials has some good ideas, a charming art style, and plenty of love for Hades, but its lack of content and limited variety keep it from reaching its full potential.
Ever since Hades helped turn the action roguelike into one of the industry’s favorite genres, a small army of heirs, imitators, and suspiciously similar cousins was inevitable. That is not necessarily a bad thing: copying a winning formula can still produce a great game. The real question is whether Grim Trials finds an identity of its own or ends up making the “we have Hades at home” meme a little too accurate.
A Shadow Too Hard to Ignore
I usually prefer to judge games on their own merits, but Grim Trials practically begs for comparison. Players take control of Avelin, a young woman recruited as the Grim Reaper’s apprentice after her death. You repeat runs, bank skill points, and master systems across a distinctive take on the afterlife. Even the cel-shading, rich color palette, and character framing immediately recall Supergiant Games’ modern classic.
The problem is that every similarity also highlights an area Hades handled better. Its characters won players over through exceptional voice acting, snappy dialogue, and reactive character portraits that shifted with the tone of the scene. In Grim Trials, every character is static and completely unvoiced, reducing a potentially charming cast to a series of flat dialogue boxes.
Three Levels Cannot Sustain This Many Runs
After roughly six hours, I had exhausted nearly everything the game had to offer. All that remained was grinding experience for a lone completionist achievement—hardly an enticing loop when there are only three biomes to explore. Repetition is intrinsic to the roguelike genre, but exhausting content before tiring of the core mechanics is a fatal flaw.
The limited build variety does not help matters. Most setups boil down to picking a basic melee or ranged option and pairing it with a single special ability. There are three melee weapons—ranging from sluggish to downright unresponsive—and four ranged variants, yet very few meaningful ways to alter how they behave. Robust status effects, elemental modifiers, and emergent synergies are sorely missing.
The crafting system is clearly intended to stretch progression, but the in-game economy is fundamentally miscalibrated. By the time I unlocked the resource-farming Collector set, I had already amassed more than enough materials to craft the rest of the gear in the game. To make matters worse, crafting requires a repetitive quick-time event that adds zero challenge and turns upgrades into tedious busywork.
An Underworld Built with Talent on a Tiny Budget
Where Grim Trials truly succeeds is in its world-building and character concepts. A sentient flame works the forge, while an arachnid weaver tailors your shrouds. The setting pulls cleverly from varied mythological visions of purgatory, showing off an art team maximizing every asset at its disposal. The heavy metal soundtrack also injects high energy, even if the tracks do not always sync with the pacing of individual encounters.
Verdict: 6/10
Grim Trials is not a bad game, but one that abruptly runs out of steam right when it needs to expand. The art direction has immense charm and the core mechanics work, but the package is held back by a severe lack of biomes, enemy types, and expressive build options. If the developers secure a larger budget for a sequel, this universe could become something truly special. For now, it remains a promising proof of concept trapped in the shadow of the titan that inspired it.