‘Grunn’ tends gardens in an uncertain, slippery reality

Sometimes Grün have your hedges and grass cut with scissors. Sometimes you discover disturbing things that are better left unseen.

You have been hired to maintain the gardens around a beautiful house. However, you are not welcome in that house, but you do get a shed to live in, which is not too bad. However, it seems like you don’t always have the tools you need. Your boss isn’t there, so you just have to poke around the area and nearby town to see if you can scrounge up what you need. If you ask the right person, he may be able to help you fulfill your duties so that you can keep your handsome living cabin.

It’s just that the people in the city seem a bit… strange. In fact, that applies to the entire area, the more you explore it. Reality feels a bit slippery. You end up in all kinds of strange, surreal places. The world continues to open up to locations you don’t think you should explore. And there are also far too many garden gnomes. This game does a great job of slowly inducing this feeling of unease. I don’t know if I’d call it fear (although I often felt a nameless fear from it). It feels more like you’re witnessing a disturbing change in the world. That there are invisible things that have always been around you, and that realization breaks through a comforting stability you never knew you would always hold.

Grün rewards curiosity and offers more to see as you expand your knowledge of how it works during playthroughs. If you can be in the right place at the right time, you can see more truths of this world. Whatever you think about the answers, Grün has a lot to show the curious. Whether you survive… we’ll see.

However, you definitely don’t get paid enough for this yard work.

Grunn is being made available on Steam today.

About the author

Joel Couture

Joel has spent the last seven years covering indie games for a variety of sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine and more, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and PT. Joel is constantly looking for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings and emotional labor that goes into the work of artists around the world.