Grunn review – part gardening sim, part survival horror thriller

It sounds like a delightful getaway. A week in a remote Dutch village tending to the garden of an absent homeowner; birds tweeting in the trees, a picturesque church just over the lane. But there’s something wrong in designer Tom van den Boogaart’s surreal and quietly eerie puzzle game. The tools are all missing, the villagers are weird and you’ve been warned not to go out at night. Plus, the sky is a hallucinogenic haze of red and orange and every once in a while you catch someone watching you from behind a door or through a window. What on earth is going on?

Grunn is somehow part gardening sim, part point-and-click adventure and part survival horror thriller. Once you find your shears and trowel you can spend time tidying the hedges and digging up mole hills, but you can also explore the tiny hamlet and its lonely haunted locations, often finding discarded Polaroid snaps which give you photographic clues to where the next tool, implement or puzzle item may be found. There’s a day-night cycle running in the background, and if you do venture out in the dark, odd glitches and ghostly beings are glimpsed at the edges of your vision. As you explore, there are perils to contend with that may well end up killing you – then you start again from scratch with only your memories and photos to guide you.

The result feels like being trapped in a Alejandro Jodorowsky movie – sinister, strange but beautiful and compelling. Everywhere you look there is some unsettling image, from skeletons lying on riverbanks, to bizarre children sitting alone in bus shelters and ferry canteens. The puzzles are shrewd and challenging, and the blocky discordant visuals make the whole environment feel like some sort of uncanny valley of the mind. If you’re looking for a very different sort of challenge, in a decidedly unnaturalistic open world, Grunn delivers much, much more than the sedate rural idyll it initially promises.