Coming Home to Grimshire
A year later, I’m starting again... and this time I’m determined to keep everyone alive.
This week, I felt the first pull towards autumn. I remembered that this time last year I was playing the newly released Grimshire, while watching one of my favourite over-40 streamers, Play with Moxie, play it too. So I put the kettle on, and sat down to start a new save file. I also rewatched some of those old streams on YouTube, and I was reminded that this is quite possibly my favourite game, despite still being in Early Access.
Grimshire is a cosy-adjacent farming and life sim with a slightly less cosy premise: plague is coming to your little village, and as the resident farmer, it’s up to you to keep everyone alive.
You grow crops, forage, fish, cook and raise animals, but this time - it matters! The village food cellar needs to stay stocked, because when winter comes, people need to eat. And if there isn’t enough of the right kind of food? Villagers can, and will, die…
The art style, music, villager interactions and day-to-day mechanics are most definitely cosy, though. I think that is exactly why I love Grimshire so much; I feel completely at home in this beautiful little village, surrounded by adorable characters and cosy houses, while feeling the weight of being responsible for keeping them all alive.
I assumed that by the time I returned, Grimshire would be in full release and I was quite excited about finally going beyond Winter 28, Year 1… only to discover that the full release isn’t planned until 2027. That didn’t put me off starting again, though.
Even knowing what’s coming, I wanted to replay it. Year 1 already contains such a deep, complete story that it is actually a full game in its own right, and there are enough decisions to make that a second playthrough doesn’t feel like repeating the first, because in Grimshire, your choices really matter!
Throughout the year, you’re given town projects that can help the villagers prepare for what’s coming, and those decisions have consequences. This time, I’m interested in choosing differently where I can and seeing what changes.
During my first playthrough, Lila, one of the NPCs, died because I hadn’t completed a particular town project. When I saw her walking around the village at the beginning of my new save, blissfully unaware of what happened to her in my other save, I thought: nope, not this time! I will be saving you!
In fact, I intend to keep everyone alive this time. Although, apparently, I’ve decided to make that slightly more difficult for myself…
How grim do you want your Grimshire?
One of my favourite things about Grimshire is the accessibility options, of which there are five:
Casual: easy mode; no villagers can die.
Gentle: an easy mode, with more time to relax and decorate.
Unsteady: for players who want a less stressful experience, but still some challenge.
Grim: the way it was meant to be played. You will struggle, fail and cry.
Challenge: a gruelling experience for the most prepared players only. It’ll be a miracle if everyone survives.
Better still, you can change the difficulty at any point in the game (even mid day). I really appreciate this, as there’s no worries about deciding you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, and you don’t have to start an entirely new save because you’ve discovered that actually, you’d quite like to spend your evening decorating your farmhouse rather than worrying about whether the village has enough salted fish to survive the winter.
I played on Gentle last time, but I’ve gone for Unsteady on this playthrough. If it gets too much, straight back down to Gentle I go!
There are some incredibly cosy houses in this village, with little rooms filled with furniture and clutter. The ominous feeling hanging over you makes you notice the gorgeous artwork and decoration throughout the game, and an ordinary conversation with a villager feels a lot more meaningful. It also makes returning home at the end of the day feel like you’ve made something of a difference.
I also absolutely love the music! Grimshire is one of the very few games I’ve actually bought the soundtrack for (Roots of Pacha and Stardew Valley being the only other two). Most of the time it’s ambient and comforting, but when something darker happens like a funeral for a villager, for example, or an attack from an out-of-towner, the music changes with it.
The art style is also beautiful. Each character portrait is hand-drawn, and the whole game uses a muted, earthy palette.
The rain sounds in Grimshire are so gorgeous. When you’re outside, you get that lovely rainy-day atmosphere, but walk into a building and you’re listening to rain hitting the roof above you. It’s such a tiny detail but I love it.
There’s loads to do in Grimshire: farming, fishing, ranching, foraging, mining, crafting, cooking… all the usual things I love in this type of game. Because you’re trying to keep a village alive, though, you do think about them a bit differently.
I barely sell any of my crops, for example. They’re far too precious! Most of what I grow either goes straight into the food cellar or gets preserved so it’ll last longer. Food expires in Grimshire, too, so you can’t just fill the cellar in spring and decide you’re sorted for the year. I’m checking what’s going off next and what I need to grow, cook or preserve that week.
Mining is much more relaxing. There’s no combat at all, which I love, so I can just head underground for a while and look for sparkly ores without something trying to kill me every five seconds.
Fishing is very simple, and the little sound that plays when you catch a new species is an absolutely fantastic dopamine hit!
Ranching, however, is one mechanic I’ve struggled with on both playthroughs. I found it difficult during my first playthrough and, apparently, a year away hasn’t magically made me any better at it.
Rather than buying animals, you find critters in the wild and tame them so they’ll come and live on your farm. To tame them, you have to bring them a food item that they love, which I think corresponds with where they are hanging out, and the forageables that are available there. I could never remember what to bring them so I’m using the very handy wiki - which wasn’t around on my first playthrough.
Finding critters can make ranching feel slow, particularly when you want to build up a nice variety of animals on your plot, and especially as we are restricted to one year of gameplay right now. There’s quite a bit of waiting for the right critter to appear at the right time while you have the right food sitting in your inventory (and before it expires!)
Once you’ve got your core critters established, though, things do become easier. You can also pay one of the villagers to find and tame them for you, but the price is quite steep if you’re early in the game.
You can also butcher your farm animals for meat. Different villagers have different dietary needs (herbivore, carnivore or omnivore, dependent on species), and meat can be stored in the village food cellar to help keep people alive. But you don’t have to do it! Fishing can provide food for carnivorous villagers, and you can buy meat from one of Grimshire’s residents instead. So if, like me, you have absolutely no intention of turning your critters into dinner, you don’t need to!
A year after my first playthrough, returning to this little village felt a bit like coming home. Admittedly, it’s a home where plague is approaching, everyone is relying on me to fill a cellar with enough food to survive winter, and I’m wandering around the woods desperately trying to remember which vegetable will convince a small animal to come and live on my farm.
But still. Home.
If you fancy hanging out and chatting about cosy games, I’m also over on YouTube where I stream whatever I’m enjoying at the moment!
This looks like such a fascinating game! Thanks for writing this and sharing your thoughts on it!
Thanks for sharing this game and the experience you had. I love games like this and I look forward to trying it out myself.