Grunn review: I was lied to, this very good gardening game is not normal at all

As befits the “very normal gardening game” that puzzly mystery box Grunn winkingly bills itself as, the first tool I obtained was a pair of shears. The second tool I obtained was a trumpet. It doesn’t really work like a trumpet, and it does things no regular trumpet could or should do. I got a trowel next. Here’s the thing about the trowel: it’s a pretty good trowel. Nothing fancy. But recently, I keep digging up… objects. Objects most peculiar. I’ve got the weekend to sort this garden, and a cosy little shed to sleep in, so I really should just get on with it. Again, though, I must reiterate: I keep digging up… objects.

I go to clean some rubbish from the bathroom. I interact with the mirror and the game says: “You do not see anything in the mirror”. I take a note that says: I do not see anything in the mirror. I check the game again and no, I still do not see anything in the mirror. Sure it’s fine. Just a shit mirror, probably. They should get it replaced. What good is a mirror you can’t see anything in?

Playfully unnerving and joyfully disorientating, Grunn is the equivalent of taking a lovely nap in a rocking chair handmade by a wizened, twinkle-eyed woodworker, then being woken up by a thrashing anomaly in the space between the walls. It takes place over two days, and you’ll need to spend your time wisely if you want to be the best gardener you can be - and also get out alive.

The first sense you get that something isn’t quite right in Grunn is the too-perfectly timed falling plank from the bridge you cross to get to the garden. It’s fine, I figured. I came from that way anyway, and I need to do some garden work. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I thought, then congratulated myself on the witticism. I found the shed where I’d be sleeping for the next few nights, grabbed my shears, then found a list from the owner.

Cut grass. Trim hedges. Water plants. Pick up trash. Get rid of molehills. Easy enough. You can move really fast if you hold down the Shift key, and you can also work the shears like mad if you hold down the mouse button, so I spent a lot of genuinely joyous time zipping up and down the garden going absolutely bungo on the overgrown grass. I’m still deeply in love with the sound the shears make. It’s sort of like an unreasonably sonorous pair of safety scissors. I’m also very enamoured with how utterly perfect Grunn’s default mouse sensitivity is. The grass never stood a chance.

You find your first Polaroid photo before you cross the bridge, showing you where a gate key is, and that’s your tutorial, basically, to keep an eye out for more. Mysteries in Grunn aren’t really about deduction or solving anything in the traditional sense, although a few are almost like classic adventure game puzzles. It’s less lock-and-key, more tearing layers of wrapping paper from a massive non-euclidean pass-the-parcel. Except, some layers lead you away from the centre, some lead you back to where you were previously, and some have severed hands in them.

The games I kept mentally comparing it to, strangely enough, were Deathloop and Outer Wilds. There’s no explicit time loop, mind, but you keep Polaroids between playthroughs. More critically, you keep your knowledge of how the strange places you’ll explore all fit together, and when to obtain certain items by so you don’t die horribly. And that’s another thing: Grunn just keeps getting bigger. The game world changes, both day by day and sometimes hour to hour. You’ll start compiling a mental checklist of places to visit first, and on certain times and certain days. Throughout, the game maintains its moreish tug-of-war between spook and whimsy.

There’s a gnome in the garden, and there might be more gnomes later. I have a passing interest in the strange specificity of the exact folkloric canon time and circumstance has led to being easily available ornamentation you can grab at any B&Q. Gnomes. Fairies. Gargoyles. Mushrooms. Grunn draws a lot of inspiration from what we might call garden lore; the hedgerow extended universe. It plays on the comforting oddness conjured by the garden’s interstitial role as both domestic extension and curated wilderness in miniature.

My Grandad was an incredibly practical dude. Only read non-fiction. Kept a pencil behind his ear. But when he stared out at his garden his face took on a faraway, dreaming quality. Grunn is a celebration, in a way, of some of the same things I think Tolkien was evoking with his depiction of the Shire: even the most well-ordered gardens feel like gateways to something faraway and magical. Spaces in between realms, and the way we adorn them respects this.

But Grunn's also just very dark and silly, and playful in not just what it shows you, but how it messes with the player experience. You’re obviously very adept at picking up litter, and that’s how you end up cleaning up an entire street and the outside of a gas station. You feel compelled to leave this little town a tidier place, and you feel Grunn is having a little chortle at you for popping crumpled cigarette packs in the bin when you should be working on not getting spooked to death. There’s also this throughline of feeling incredibly isolated from all the characters you meet because they speak in a language you can’t understand, but at the same time it taking on a sort of cute toytown vibe. A very cosy, European purgatory.

Is Grunn for you? Well, do you like the feeling of doing things that took you a long time before, again, but really fast? Do you like weird and delightful discoveries? Do you like going ‘ah!’ really loudly when a mystery clicks together? Do you like dying in various ways and unlocking new endings and knowing to do things a little differently next time around? Do you like knowing how many coins you’ve picked up? Actually, Grunn doesn’t tell you that unless you pick up another coin. That’s annoying, Grunn. Please sort that. Otherwise: Grunnderful stuff. Gnome notes. Dig in.