$2.99Grim Nights Thirteen days to survive
Dig, build and train by day, then hold your village against the undead every night.
Is Grim Nights worth it?
Grim Nights is worth it if…
- you like colony sims where every settler has a name, a face and a job only they do well
- you enjoy a day-and-night rhythm of building calmly and defending desperately
- you want a strategy game that will beat you a few times before you beat it
- you have a fondness for retro pixel art and old-school side-scrolling design
- you like short, tense runs you can finish in an evening and then immediately start again
Screenshots
Every villager is someone
Your settlers are not numbers on a spreadsheet. Each one arrives with a randomly generated face, name and abilities, so the miner with a knack for gold actually digs more of it, and the villager who is bad at everything still has to eat somewhere. You decide who chops wood, who descends into the mines, and who picks up a sword when the horde comes. Losing one stings a little, which is exactly the point: the story of a run is written by who survives and who does not.
The rhythm of day and night
Daylight is for work. You gather wood on the surface, then dig underground for stone, iron and gold, the deeper you go the richer the seams. You expand the village, put up buildings and train your force from eleven unit types. Then night falls and the undead arrive in waves, fifteen enemy kinds in all, and the day's planning gets tested whether you are ready or not. That push and pull, one calm stretch and one desperate one, is what keeps a session going long past the "just one more day" you promised yourself.
A hard game that says so
That is not marketing, it is a fair description. Your first village probably falls around the middle of the thirteen days, and the lesson it teaches (too many farmers, too few soldiers, or the reverse) makes the next attempt smarter. There are difficulty settings, three maps, three bosses and an endless mode, and a full run takes roughly seven to eight hours, with the option to keep going as long as you please.
Can you keep playing after day 13?
Can you keep playing after day 13?
Yes. A full run lasts about seven to eight hours, but the game lets you continue for as long as you please, and there is an endless mode for when surviving thirteen days is no longer enough of a challenge.
How much micromanagement is involved?
Quite a lot, and that is part of the design. Workers have individual traits you assign jobs around, and managing who digs, who farms and who fights is the core of the game. Fair warning: directing workers around ladders and keeping track of idle ones can get fiddly in a large late-game village.
What do you actually fight?
Fifteen kinds of undead across the waves, from ordinary shamblers to bigger problems, plus three unique bosses. A bestiary records the monsters you have met and their characteristics, so you can study what is coming for your walls.
Is one playthrough different from the last?
Yes. Villagers come with random faces, names and abilities, there are three maps to play across, and difficulty settings change the pressure. Which traits you roll shapes your whole economy, so a new run plays out differently from the start.
