Among the traits that I tend to value most in indie games, a sense of originality and fresh approaches to well-worn genre play are consistently at the top of the list. I love the risks that indie games can take, going with strange ideas or in an odd direction that more mainstream developers wouldn’t generally dare. Of course, there can be peril in that choice, as not all new styles of play are necessarily great, or at least may not always be implemented in a way that ends up being ideal. Great God Grove, with its unique style and mechanics, for me falls into that trap, but is at least able to somewhat recover.

The story is a bit unusual, for certain, as it seems that everything is in turmoil with the gods, who are squabbling and risking bringing about the Apocalypse. In order to try to help prevent this, your character’s job is to chat them up, try to understand what their issues may be, and then figure out how to either help or at least divert their attention from heralding the end of the world. In order to do this, you’ll most often make use of your powerful, though somewhat odd, tool called the Megapon, which is able to suck in and then shoot out a variety of objects, but more critically it can also work with specific lines of dialogue as well. This is at least creative, and can make for some unusual solutions, but may not always be ideal overall.

There’s just something a little off about some areas of the game that can be hard to look past. The interface has issues with different items overlapping in some cases, which is needlessly sloppy. The solutions to some of the game’s puzzles, while often pretty funny and cool, aren’t always ideal in their overall implementation. More often than not it started to feel necessary to resort to simple trial and error to get by the problems people will have, often having some clever twist of language at the center of the necessary solution, but then feeling very left field at times. It just sometimes feels like it’s trying so hard to be clever that it manages to fake itself out a little even.

If you find odd humor and characters to be of particular interest, I have no doubt that you’d likely enjoy the journey more than you’d be frustrated by it, but even as a lover of weird games some of its implementation choices just feel sloppy or weird. For instance, while I suppose it’s novel early on, you're supposed to use motion controls to either nod or shake your head, and this feels cumbersome at best. I suppose it’s a novel thing to implement, but it also feels cumbersome and unnecessary in the overall scheme of the experience. This is just a very odd bird of a game, and I think it’s likely going to be a take it or leave it proposition for most people.