Great God Grove review: play mail carrier and god wrangler in this wonderfully weird puzzle adventure

Great God Grove is, in a word, bonkers. I’ve stopped a small community from completing a blood ritual, played the role of matchmaker to a group of lonely hearts that involved organising a date with god, and plastered a statue with paint as part of a revolutionary movement to uplift the power of art. My time with GGG has been a pick n’ mix of colourful escapades, and together with its story of godly woes, striking art style, vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing puppet work, I’m now a die-hard LimboLane devotee.

Playing as the grove’s new mail carrier, your job is to explore a strange island delivering messages to the roster of weird characters and even weirder gods. A giant cosmic rip in the sky threatens to destroy the world unless the gods stop it, but unfortunately, they’re all out of action and causing chaos – squabbling with each other, flooding the grove with their endless tears, or demanding a human sacrifice. Alongside mail carrier, you can add agony aunt and deity wrangler to your CV.

To help bring the gods and their followers back from the brink of disarray while also stopping the impending calamity, you’ll deliver their messages – but not in the traditional postal sense. Using your megaphone tool, you can suck up a character’s speech bubble and then fire it at someone else, in the world’s most bizarre game of telephone. You have room in your inventory for up to five speech bubbles, and using this arsenal of word snippets, you need to solve some lightweight puzzles. For example, one character is too nervous to confess his feelings to his buff lumberjack love interest, so you can suck up his confession, run across the island, and fire it at her to help him out.

This wonderfully strange idea keeps presenting itself in new ways. You might need to suck up a whispered password and then fire it at someone guarding a door to gain access, or you might need to deliver direct instructions from one person to another. Getting creative with words and their different interpretations is all part of the puzzle-solving and who said what and what is being said to who is a satisfying ball of yarn to untangle. No, you can’t suck up every single speech bubble, which means only those highlighted with a special border. But it helps to streamline your focus and stop the vacuum mechanic from feeling too overwhelming.

Not every speech snippet needs to be used strictly for a puzzle. You can fire dialogue at any character and it will almost always provoke a response and fun interaction. I once ran around the Grove firing ‘I’m HAM-HOT for a handsome god’ to everyone to see their reaction and was not disappointed. Puzzle solving isn’t just limited to hoovering up dialogue bubbles, you’ll be using your sucking power to pull levers and pick up items too. I even sucked up someone’s sneeze, which when fired would burst into a gross, germy cloud. There are also ‘combat’ sequences, but ‘combat’ feels way too serious for what is essentially launching pumpkins at a little guy wearing a traffic cone for a helmet.

Everything feels so playful in Great God Grove, and it’s only emphasised by the eye-catching art style. It looks like something you’d come across on Adult Swim surfing the channels at 1 AM. I’m also in love with the way the characters speak. You know when the film Juno was released and every teenager wanted to absorb the entire script into their vocabulary? I want to do that with Great God Grove. Everyone has their own unique tone of voice, the way they speak, and how they pronounce words. A standout is the character Inspecka and their group of cronies called the Bizzyboys who have a very specific lexicon that is such a scarily accurate throwback to 2010’s Tumblr talk I got serious whiplash.

The gods themselves are also totally wild, and GGG makes them all loveable and childlike rather than serious overlords. They’re also all presented in 3D instead of 2D, giving them an otherworldly feel, like they could burst through your screen at any moment. These chats are always in first-person, and developers LimboLane bring back a wonderful mechanic they used in their first game Smile For Me. When a god asks a question you can use the mouse to shake your head in agreement or disagreement. Your protagonist may be silent, but with this nod-and-shake option, you’re given a voice. I’d often go for a more contrarian answer to be a bit cheeky and see how they would react. Who doesn’t love provoking a god?

Another element LimboLane continued from Smile For Me is the use of physical puppets, which are as cute as they are creepy. Videotapes found around the grove will feature felt versions of the characters, giving you more context and lore to the world. There’s very much a Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared-style undertone to these sections, as the puppets begin to become more unhinged the further into the game you go. All I can say is that I did not need to see a cute felt puppet make a ‘burger’ by slapping its face into a very real, gross slab of meat.

There’s so much to love about Great God Grove. It’s the perfect example of a handcrafted game through and through, from its striking art style, strange lexicon, brilliant vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and haunting puppet work. There are several important messages to decipher in its surrealism. The game has a lot to say about deviation, power, art, censorship, and how it feels being a loser with no discernable life direction. It’s like a kid’s show with an important message at its core, like if Sesame Street wanted to teach you about the manipulative pitfalls of idol worship. In this strange world, even gods fear being forgotten, but GGG won’t have that problem as it’s hands down one of the boldest games of 2024.