Great God Grove review: Sucking up (and blasting out) speech bubbles is a wildly creative twist for this story-first adventure

The pen is mightier than the sword. After all, words can cut directly to someone's heart. So imagine the power of those words if you could pluck them right out of someone else's mouth using the Megapon – a divine cross between a megaphone and a cannon – and then rocket them directly at another person?

While your arrival to the grove is a peaceful one, stumbling upon the Megapon by chance as your boat pulls into port, you arrive in a land already thrown into turmoil thanks to poor choices of words. Great God Grove is where a mix of deities live close to their subjects, and King, the God of Communication, has mysteriously gone missing. Before he vanished, however, he left letters within each realm sowing discord between the Gods with both one another and their subjects.

To make matters worse, this disarray comes on the precipice of disaster. Once a generation, a rift opens above the grove that can ascend someone to join the pantheon once entered. Yet, if the gods don't come together to close it afterwards, it risks ripping all of reality apart. It's up to you, known on arrival as Godpoke, to get people talking to one another again. Even if you have to use your magical suction cannon to do it.

Helping hand

It's not the first time developer LimboLane has let players loose into a world of strange rules with the task of bringing a community back together. Back in the fantastic Smile For Me, you had to cheer up residents by nodding and shaking your head. Great God Grove has a similar structure, with you talking to the people in each area as you progress to help solve what ails them, but using speech bubbles as items adds a lot of depth. It's sort of like a point and click adventure game, except your dialogue tree and inventory are one and the same, your options constantly changing as you hoover up special highlighted parts of their dialogue that you can then keep inside your Megapon's chamber before shooting them out (you can store five at once).

The head nodding and shaking system returns as well, Great God Grove being split into third-person and first-person sections. Usually it's the former, yet when you enter the chamber of a deity it switches the perspective, emphasizing how overwhelmingly large the presence of each god is. Though even here you can blast them with speech bubbles as well as just moving your noggin, using remarks from other people to query aspects of their unique domain or ask for elaboration on the people's wishes (the gods are usually a source of hints too).

Joining you throughout your quest is Inspekta and his Bizzy Boys. The God of Leadership, his divine chamber is located in a big van, meaning he's always watching, and ready to brief you on each new bit of drama between levels. The Bizzy Boys are essentially living puppets who cause more mischief than good, often hazards you need to work around as much as they're actual helping hands. Still, they give the world some exposition via some quite funny mixed-media live-action puppet shows you can uncover in each level.

High-sommar

While only some parts of a conversation are suck-able – usually one per bit of dialogue – there's an abundance of options, so it doesn't feel too on rails. Plenty of speech bubbles can be used to just add some color as you see how people react to some offbeat remarks, or will just tell you more about the subject to clue you into a better use of the phrase. Handily, if the phrase isn't a puzzle solution, you'll be able to suck it back up to use again too.

At its best, Great God Grove is about untangling a web of everyone's desires to ultimately make their realm a better place. Mildread, the second location you reach, is home to Cobigail, the God of the Harvest. But, misinformation spread by King has divorced the people from the harvest rituals they used to observe, making their crops fallow, and leaving everyone – Cobigail included – forgetful of how things used to be.

Scrabbling for a solution, even human sacrifice may be on the menu next. Solving everything here has you picking your way through some quirky characters to access new locations in the rural town, piecing together little memories of better days and using them to jog the memory of others. Using the words of others as opposed to your own really helps to create the sense that you're guiding a community on a better path under their own steam rather than just rocking into a town as a cowboy-booted savior all on your own.

On your way

Yet, few locations manage to match up to this relatively early one (there's only really four in total, with one of those being a tutorial – it's a breezy experience). The human sacrifice element is high stakes, the colors of Mildread's perpetual sunset are striking, and the way you move back and forth through locations in the smalltown make the mission progression feel like it builds upon itself.

Each subsequent location juggles two gods at once, in realms that have communities and ideologies that aren't always aligned. But, rather than add more conflict, these areas can feel a bit spread thin as a result, not really giving you the same depth. HobbyHoo has a writer and an editor god, the former having their own Woodstock-like stage theater area and the latter an urban downtown zone. But, while a wedge has been driven between them, the conflict feels fairly weak.

Each space in these areas has fun characters as well, but they're more brief detours to suck up what you need rather than particularly strong in their own right. The same goes for the following level that introduces the concept of an artistic revolutionary group… only to have them give you a series of quite fetch-questy missions.

Fairly brief, Great God Grove doesn't outstay its welcome, and its great gimmick remains novel throughout. Even when you're solving some less satisfying and more basic puzzles, you're always doing so in a way few other games have ever allowed you to do. Peaking early in its structure, though, you do spend the back half of the game probing with your vacuum for anything that will feel as good. While the conclusion to the story is satisfying and emotional, it just sort of happens without making you work all too much for it.

This is another wonderfully innovative twist on a narrative-first adventure game from LimboLane, and I can't wait to see what they do next. The highs in Great God Grove as you bounce between some wonderfully visualized characters who are all offbeat in their own ways will stick with you. Each animated to flit between strong key-frames without much in-between movement, Great God Grove has a striking and high impact sense of style. In comparison, what you're doing can end up feeling much tamer. But it certainly doesn't suck.

Looking for something else with a strong narrative? Our best game stories list will help you out!