Grindstone Review (TwoDee)
Grindstone is a tile-matching puzzle game with a fairly butch framing aesthetic for the genre; instead of gems or blocks, the protagonist must gorily slaughter his or her way through long lines of color-coded enemies, finessing the end position of the combo so that the enemies can't hit back between turns.
The game originated as a mobile title, and it shows: it's optimized for touchscreen (although it also handles beautifully with the Steam Deck's joystick) and prioritizes quantity over quality of content. Grindstone has hundreds and hundreds of levels, few of which are particularly distinctive or well-differentiated, and the experience can get very samey if the player just tries to plow through the game in one go. However, despite that emphasis on quantity, the baseline quality of Grindstone is quite high to begin with. The core game loop of chaining huge combos is satisfying and the difficulty is fairly forgiving, with some occasional levels jumping up in complexity. Rarely, it can take some very big-brain maneuvers to figure out a combo trajectory that won't end with the player being hurt, killed, or boxed into a corner at the end of it.
The original soundtrack, by musician Sam Webster, is a brilliant match for the title: meditative, dreamy trip-hop, unobtrusive enough that it can just melt into long hours of gameplay without distraction but distinctive enough that I always feel like I'm going "ooh, it's this track, I love this track" when I start a level. The art and animation style is probably going to be the most polarizing: it's modeled off of the contemporary Cartoon Network house style, often derisively referred to as "CalArts style," "Bean Mouth," "thin line art style," or occasionally as "the downfall of Western civilization" by the most terminally online people in the world. Personally, I like this look a lot for the game: it reminds me of the later, more adult-oriented Pendleton Ward works like The Midnight Gospel.
The perfect way to consume Grindstone is at the cadence of the mobile game it was intended to be: it doesn't really hold up to a marathon session because of the aforementioned saminess between puzzles, but I've been playing a few levels a day to feel my brain get tickled in the same way that some people do their daily crossword or sudoku. Together with the fantastic presentation, it's a great little hit of dopamine to start or end my day.