Review: Great God Grove Is a Great, Goofy Game

Great God Grove is, at its core, one big fetch quest. One person needs something, you go get it and bring it to them, and repeat that pattern for the entire run of the game. This has the potential to be tedious drudgery, and yet this concept was turned into something thoroughly compelling instead.

Great God Grove puts you in the shoes of a nameless godpoke. You are like a cowpoke, but your job is wrangling gods. You are sent to an island populated by the world’s various gods with the task of fixing a serious problem. A rift is opening in the sky, but the gods are too busy arguing with each other to do anything about it. You need to get them talking again so the world can be saved.

You are aided in your task with the Megapon, a lip-shaped megaphone that doubles as a vacuum cleaner. You suck in the words of characters you talk to, then blast them at other characters who need to hear those words. That’s the entire game. You’re a cosmic mediator who bluntly forces everyone to listen to what they need to hear.

Let me give you an example of how Great God Grove works. At the start of the game, you find yourself in an area that’s constantly raining due to the tears of the local god who’s sad at the disappearance of your predecessor, King. So now you must speak to the locals and get them to say something encouraging that he would have said, suck those words up and shoot them at the crying god to reassure her.

While most of the game involves figuring out the correct words to progress, there are also plenty of useless joke phrases that exist simply to spark some goofy interactions. Like sucking up a speech bubble saying “Boo!” and using it to terrify everyone in the vicinity or shooting random compliments at whoever you feel needs one.

It’s a simple concept but Great God Grove is incredibly creative in how it approaches it. The game is broken into a series of areas, each with their own squabbling deities, and each of these areas presents a unique challenge to crack. And they are genuine challenges, with many sections making me circle around several times until I was able to piece together what words I needed to throw around to progress.

This is where Great God Grove shines. Quite often the words you need to combine are less obvious than you’d expect. In one area, I had to wake someone who was blocking my way, and despite my efforts of throwing various shouted phrases at them, they wouldn’t wake up. It wasn’t until I realised that I could swipe the metaphorical phrase “open your eyes” uttered by another character and turn it literal. There are so many moments like this, where you’ll beat your head against the desk for a while until suddenly that “aha!” moment kicks in and you realize that seemingly useless phrase in your inventory is the key to everything.

The inventory is also an inspired move, as it restricts you to five items total. Not just phrases, anything you suck up with the vacuum goes here, including beach balls, pumpkins or planks of wood. This means you can’t brute force these puzzles by sucking up every phrase in the area and throwing them until something sticks. You have to pay attention, keep note of everyone’s needs and wants, and actively seek out what might make sense and tossing out anything that doesn’t.

It helps that the world of Great God Grove is full of bizarre characters. This is not a game that takes itself seriously. This is most obvious in how much of your time is spent hanging out with the local detective force, the Bizzyboys. These boys are incompetent, often chasing the most useless leads or bickering amongst themselves while you do the actual work. They are also responsible for the chaotic live-action puppet shows that crop up in each area. While their purpose is to explain the world’s lore, they mostly left me confused. That’s a compliment, by the way, as the manic energy is what makes Great God Grove so appealing.

This extends to most of the cast, who are a misfit bunch of weirdos across the board. Almost everyone has odd speech quirks, boisterous personalities or have strong reactions to everything you say. And yet, despite all this, their problems remain relatable. Even at their silliest, there’s a logic to their complaints. In a game where puzzle-solving and comedy are both key elements, it’s easy to let one side get in the way of the other but Great God Grove keeps its puzzles grounded while layering jokes on top. There are no LucasArts-style “monkey wrench” puzzles here.

The art style helps the vibes. It’s similar to Paper Mario, where cutout-style 2D sprites are layered in a pseudo-3D top-down view. Character designs look like they’ve been lifted out of a turn-of-the-century Saturday morning cartoon, where asymmetry and exaggerated features rule. Your character is especially notable in their weirdness, with their hair covering almost their entire face apart from a persistent perma-grin. Meanwhile, every single visit to a god sees them shoving their ridiculous faces in your view with theatrical flair with every word they speak.

That said, while I did enjoy what Great God Grove had to offer, sometimes it can be a bit much. Most of its tone is intensely in-your-face and it rarely lets up. Most of the time I was happy to go along with it, but there were times when I had to turn the game off for a while until I was in the right mood for it. Some character speech quirks were also a little grating at times, and in a few rare occasions, made it harder to understand what was being said. Its humor is definitely an acquired taste, and it’s likely that some players won’t click with it at all.

The only other major complaint I had about the game was how unwieldy managing all the speech bubbles could be at times. Sucking up words takes a couple of seconds, and if you’re trying out different words in different places, it can be tedious to shoot the speech bubble and spend time sucking it back up before it disappears. Quite often this could also result in an active conversation happening while your inventory is open and a discarded speech bubble is on screen, which caused the screen to get cluttered and almost unreadable.

In addition, the limited inventory space sometimes causes problems for puzzles that require multiple speech bubbles to solve. A song you have to assemble at one point in the game requires four lines, so it becomes much harder to engage with other characters when all but one of your inventory slots are blocked up.

Ultimately, Great God Grove is a great romp about the importance of good communication. If you enjoy puzzle games, the works of Double Fine, or Undertale, you’ll find a lot to love here.

Great God Grove is available on the PC, Switch and Xbox Series X/S.