Don’t let the vibrant, cosy game exterior fool you. Grimoire Groves, the new rogue-lite dungeon crawler from Stardust Games, holds plenty of hidden challenge. Playing as Primrose, a young witch-in-training, you’ll need to master your spells to tame the plants of the forest, restore order to an unruly garden, and perhaps solve a mystery or two along the way.
Grimoire Groves sees you dropped into its world at the final phase of Primrose’s witch apprenticeship, where her learnings are in the hands of Lavender, an elder witch living in an overgrown garden. Primrose can’t see the causal link between restoring Lavender’s garden and achieving her witchy goals, but Lavender insists that this is how it’s done.
The early stages of the game can be a little frustrating if you miss some key details about how the world works – and we wouldn’t blame you because Lavender’s training is brief. If you’ve played a roguelike before, it’s likely that you’ll recognise some elements. If you’re coming to the experience from the cosy game side of things, though, there are a few unique rules. That’s where we can help! Take a look at some tips and early-game advice below to help put you on the right path.
Leave no plant unfed
Grimoire Groves starts you off with a quick explanation of how to feed and plant a group of Beanies. The key thing to note here is that – however Lavender might like to spin it otherwise – plants are your adversaries. If you get too close to them, they’ll try to “hug” you, and if they latch on for too long, they’ll slow you down, which can cause damage. So keep it moving and dash to shake those Beanies off when needed!
In order to feed the plants, you need to have the correct elemental magic equipped: red for fire, yellow for earth, blue for water and turquoise for air. You will know which element a plant wants to be fed based on the colour of its body. This is easy to learn but sometimes difficult to remember when you’re dealing with a big group of plants with multiple elemental preferences. If you’re ever feeling confused about why a plant isn’t growing, double check that you have the right magic equipped. It’s an easy mistake to make in the heat of the moment.
Each plant has a radius around it that triggers their instinct to hug you once you’ve been in it for long enough. You can use this to your advantage by baiting plants out of their groups and picking them off one by one. This becomes especially important later in the game because you won’t survive running head first into a great horde of plants.
Once engaged, it’s important that you feed a plant as quickly as you can because neglecting their needs will deplete your energy bar. That’s right, if you run away before you’ve given a plant enough love, their sadness will quite literally drain the life out of you.
If you’re successful in fighting off the creepers nurturing the flora, they drop a variety of resources that will come in handy later.
Sleep is for the weak
If too much of your energy is drained, you’ll ‘fall asleep’ and awake back in Lavender’s Garden with slightly less of a haul of goods. It seems the cutesy plants in the forest aren’t above pickpocketing their items back when you’re unconscious, but at least there’s no permadeath to sour the cute and cosy vibes, and autosaves are frequent.
If you come to the end of one of the short levels and you don’t think you have enough energy left to forge onward, you can choose to preemptively teleport straight back to Lavender’s Garden using one of the Purple Portals that’s placed near the end of the area. In this regard, Grimoire Groves goes easy on you. You don’t need to make it to the end of an entire run to return home without losing any resources.
Beyond that, if you really want to take the rogue out of roguelike, there’s a “Relaxed Mode” in the settings. This stops you from taking damage but unfortunately doesn’t reduce the strength of the plants, so they still take some work to wrangle.
Follow the yellow wooden portals (or don’t)
The level maps in Grimoire Groves are, as to be expected of a roguelike, procedurally-generated, so we can’t tell you exactly what you will encounter. We can tell you that if you want to continue to generate new levels to explore, you want to choose the Yellow Portal when the time comes. As mentioned above, the Purple Portals will always take you straight back to home base, so if you want to delve deeper into the forests, those should be avoided.
In the beginning you’ll only be able to hack your way through three levels that constitute the Earth Forest. You’ll then need to face a boss – see our instructions below – to complete the run. Once you’ve unlocked new shrines and biomes, the portals will also be blue, red and turquoise to correspond with the biome they’re leading you to. There’s a maximum of ten levels to explore in a single run once you’ve unlocked all the biomes.
Choose your spells wisely
You can equip three spells at a time using the Witch WiFi – the tree in the top left hand corner of Lavender’s Garden. You start with Elemental Puddle, which casts a small circle of magic on the ground that plants need to hover in to be nourished. It’s undeniably weak and you should ditch it as soon as possible.
New spells are unlocked at the mushrooms below the Witch WiFi using combinations of the resources you collect from your flora-filled dungeon crawls. Choose the spells you unlock carefully because you will be spamming them constantly to keep the plants at bay and it can take a good while to save up the resources for a new spell.
The mushrooms follow pathways like an actual spell tree, so you can follow a path to gain spells of a similar effect. Early on, you can unlock Magical Gust, which lets you sweep a cloud of energy in a particular direction; Flower Vortex, which creates a vortex that pulls plants into one easy-to-target spot; and Butterfly Pond, which is effectively just Elemental Puddle with a greater range.
Aim to unlock these spells before other nice-to-have upgrades in the garden because they’re the key to having a much easier time in combat and thus having more resources to spend. The order in which you unlock them might be determined by what plants spawn during your run through the forest and the subsequent availability of resources, but where possible, go for what you think will be most useful to your playstyle.
Spend it like you stole it
Resources pay for more than just spells. They’re the currency for everything.
The bad news is, entering the forest for a new run will compost all of the resources you’ve collected. It’s important to use them up wherever possible or they’ll be turned to unappealing brown slop. You can still save up for the upgrades you want by depositing resources into the spell mushrooms, shrines and other unlockables incrementally to avoid waste.
That being said, if there’s more than one place a resource could be spent, don’t let go of it without some planning. You might lock yourself out of unlocking anything at all for an extended period of time, which will only make your progress more difficult. Walk around the garden, following the quest markers for all available upgrades, and check all of your options before deciding where to spend your hard-earned seeds.
We’re giving compost a bad wrap, because it does actually have its uses – such as for playing the Cauldroven mini game with friends you meet in the forest – but your precious resources are best spent on upgrading your spells and Lavender’s Garden, especially when you’re just starting out.
There’s a fine Shrine between love and hate
Speaking of spending resources, if you want new areas to explore, invest in the Shrines. Shrines are responsible for expanding the world of Grimoire Groves. Unlocking the first level of a shrine will grant you the ability to use its corresponding elemental magic. This is a double edged sword because plants in matching colours will start appearing in the forest and that increases the overall difficulty of each run by adding more things for you to think about.
Unlocking the second level of a Shrine will open that element’s biome, greatly expanding the number of plants and resources you have access to, and unravelling the story. You might be happy to run through the Earth Forest repeatedly at first, but eventually it becomes tedious. Ideally, you want to balance the use of your resources to unlock new biomes at a time when you’re at a comfortable level with managing the plants you’re tending to but before it feels like a grind.
All of that is easier said than done when unused resources get composted – until you unlock an upgrade later in the game. There are further benefits to shrine upgrades, such as Charms Pedestals, but the first two levels are the most important to note at the beginning.
How to beat the giant mushroom aka Sneezus
The first boss you encounter is the aptly named Sneezus, a giant sneezing mushroom in the Earth Forest. A rundown of steps needed to plant it firmly in the ground are as follows;
- Proceed into the battleground and wait for mini mushrooms to spawn in.
- Lure them into one of the three circles marked on ground – Flower Vortex is useful to keep them in place – and love them to death with your spells.
- Once you’ve planted enough mushrooms in a circle, a mushroom bridge will grow, allowing you to run across the river to Sneezus. You don’t need to build all three bridges at once because they’ll only get destroyed in a moment anyway.
- Once on the other side, cast spells at Sneezus until it sneezes and pushes you back over the stream, or cross back over beforehand to prevent taking damage.
- Rinse and repeat this cycle until Sneezus has had enough of your tough love and you can loot it.
There are a million more tips we could give you, as Grimoire Groves becomes more complex the deeper you grow your roots, but hopefully these will be enough to get you started with more confidence than Lavender instills in you.
