I think it is time to slow down a little bit after the incredibly exciting week of playing Children of the Sun and play a nice cozy narrative game. I remember seeing the puppet in a compressed video on Twitter and was looking frantically for the game until I came across it when I found a demo that I going to play for today. I immediately abandoned the original game and played this week’s demo. This week, with my messenger gun that has lips, I attempt to save the world after the Gods abandon the festival that closes a world-ending rift in the sky. This week is Great God Grove.

Great God Grove is a 2D/3D narrative game from LimboLane and FellowTraveller. The demo is available on Steam and will be released for the PC in the fall of 2024.

Every year a world-ending rift opens up in the sky and the pantheon of Gods comes together to close it to save humanity, but this year they haven’t gotten together because their god of communication has sent them all letters or something telling them how stupid they are and disappearing. This means that there is a lot of in fighting and a lot of no one wanting to do stuff so you, the new messenger with the Megapon, to solve all of the problems and help close the rift.

Great God Grove is strictly a narrative game, so you are walking around and talking to a lot of different characters. I think in the demo alone I talked to about twenty different characters. The catch with this game is that the messenger gun that you hold allows you to take items and thought bubbles and hold onto them until you need them. The latter is emphasized the most in the demo. Little dotted lines appear when you can hold the right mouse button and suck up that specific item or thought and when you need to use it you shoot it in their face.

A God needs a compliment and a mailman cannot express his love for the love of his life and apparently, the only person to help with that is the new communication man. They are all eager to talk to you about how you look like the old communication man and how the world is going to end unless you pick up the slack.

You meet some other really fun characters like the blue monkeys that worship the ground that their “Inspekta” walks on. They aim to save the world with you so they can share in the glory but, at least in the demo, they offer almost zero help.

The narrative is serious, fun, and comedic. It is everything I want in a strictly narrative video game.

There is not much going on outside of learning how the Megapon delivers the items to solve the fetch quests. It is fun trying to deduce who needs what item or encouragement to move the dialogue along.

I don’t really know how to describe the art design for this video game. Characters are 2D but sometimes have movement that pushes them into 3D. They act like cardboard cut-outs and there are cutscenes that involve puppets. The game looks great regardless but it is hard to pin down. I really love the animations of the main characters.

Great God Grove’s demo was fun. I enjoyed having to talk to all of the characters that were littered around the starting area. Every character is written differently so you don’t really know what is going to happen when you talk to them. I had to keep off a woman o she could tell me the lore of the land and why it is important to cheer up the god that is crying so much that it is flooding the area. There is a secretive women that wont talk to you until you tell her what she wants to hear. The monkey squad is goofy and thoroughly entertaining the whole demo.

You cannot pass this demo up if you enjoy narrative games. It’s a blast