In American McGee's Grimm you take control of the titled character, Grimm, a nasty pirate-looking dwarf that envelopes his surrounding area with fear and darkness wherever he walks. American McGee's Grimm presents darkness in a new light. Whoever said the expression "cleanliness is next to godliness" must have had the foresight to know that developer Spicy Horse would release a game that equates darkness to dirtiness in 2008. That phrase perfectly encapsulates the theme of this game.
Your job as the bringer of darkness and the stinker of ungodliness is to run around and spread chaos across several medium-sized environments. The lands will turn dark and things such as traps and skeleton hands will emerge from the ground wherever you wander. While you are doing this, your Dark-O-Meter will fill up, allowing you to cause more destruction. Imagine a very twisted Katamari Damacy, but replace the ball with stinky evilness, and American McGee's Grimm is what you get.
On your twisted travels you will come across innocent women and children. As you walk toward people, they die. That's right; you murder people in this cartoony platformer. The first time I saw innocent children playing, I walked up to them and as soon as that happened they became strangled to death by a noose. This stuff is Grimm indeed. How it "wrangled" up a Teen rating is beyond me.
You can do all of this with the traditional WASD keyboard controls to move, space bar to jump, and the mouse to change direction. In addition to the simple and intuitive controls, the game has a very straightforward premise. Missions will give you specific areas to "butt stomp," the move that Mario has pioneered. You do this by tapping the jump button twice over your respective target. But, before you start your bun workout, you're going to have to raise your dark-o-meter. There are 11 levels of stink to climb, and while missions won't ask to completely "stinkify" the area before you can butt stomp your target, you do raise your overall mission score by doing so.
The biggest problem with A Boy Who Learns What Fear Is is that it's essentially a really shallow game. Other than what I've already described to you, there's not much else. In addition, this episode is also very short and easy. You can easily beat the game within 45 minutes your first time through. Your only opposition is people/animals that clean up your mess if you leave them alone long enough. But if you power up your meter, you can simply kill them off by running towards them. The only way to die is to jump into water or lava, from which you will be instantly revived. For a game that features childlike challenge and aesthetics, at its core it's a pretty twisted title, which is an odd design choice.
What is also odd is the zany story, which attempts to marry the design and gameplay together. Aptly named, A Boy Who Learns What Fear Is features a boy who is curious about what fear means. When he asks his father what it is, the dad shrugs him off. Your job as Grimm is to scare the living daylights out of him, which you do on each of the game's six missions. It's a nonsensical story that plays out with a longwinded, theatrical, opening and closing cinematic.
Speaking of closings, there were times where I wished I could have closed my eyes. The graphics are a mixed bag, with mostly bad tossed in. Because I'm a tease, I'll start with the good. The game has a pretty cool light-hearted, yet comically evil, fantasy aesthetic going for it. The game also features a dash of motion blur, a graphical technique commonly used today. Unfortunately, that's the only thing the graphics are up-to-date on. The graphics engine looks extremely dated and cheap overall. The frame rate would randomly hitch, which is odd considering everything is low polygonal. In addition, the textures look very basic and elementary. Another graphical problem emanated from the ground you walk on. Puffs of stinky smoke rise from the earth and the developers were clearly trying to go for the puffy cloud aesthetic that adventure game Okami nailed so well back in 2006. However, it ends up looking like awkward screen tears. It doesn't help matters when nearly everything is pixilated and jaggy. To be fair, it is a game meant for a wider variety of computers, but would it hurt to make the game more up-scalable? One aspect of the graphics that I do appreciate is when you get smellier, flies start to swarm around you. That's a nice touch.
Another nice touch is the voice acting, which is pretty good at being cartoonish and silly. The voices are so stereotypical of the fantasy stories that they go over the top and are quite humorous. Picture the voice of gingerbread man from the Shrek movies. You can't help but chuckle when you kill some innocent kid as he screams out "don't hurt me!" It's good stuff. The music on the other hand isn't quite as entertaining. The one in-game song features a quiet vaudevillian-type of jingle in the background. It can actually be annoying if you pay attention to it. The sound effects fair a little better with the stereotypical exaggerated cartoon sound effects.