Almost Human is a small Finnish studio that proved a four-person team could revive one of PC gaming's oldest genres and find a large audience for it. Founded in February 2011 in Matinkylä, Espoo, by Juho Salila and Olli Pelz from Futuremark and Antti Tiihonen and Petri Häkkinen from Remedy Entertainment, four developers with more than thirty years of combined experience who left established studios to build something of their own, the company set out to make a modern successor to the grid-based, first-person dungeon crawlers of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder lineage that had gone almost untouched for two decades. Legend of Grimrock arrived on Windows on April 11, 2012, casting the player as a party of four prisoners exiled to Mount Grimrock and left to descend through the mountain one level at a time, solving pressure-plate puzzles, rationing food and torchlight, and fighting in real time on a tile grid where a single step back can be the difference between a clean kill and a dead party. Mac and Linux versions followed on December 19, 2012 through Humble Indie Bundle 7, and the game passed 600,000 copies by January 2013 and 900,000 by October 2014, remarkable numbers for a self-published debut. A Dungeon Editor gave players the tools to build and share their own dungeons, and the custom-dungeon community it created is still active today. Later ports brought the game to iOS in May 2015 and Nintendo Switch in January 2024.
Legend of Grimrock II started life as downloadable content for the first game, but by the beginning of 2013 the plans had outgrown that scope and the studio committed to a full sequel, adding graphics artist Jyri Ullakko as a fifth member and trading its first office next to a horse stable for a business center in Keilaniemi, Espoo. Released on Windows on October 15, 2014, with an OS X version on March 18, 2015, it moved the series out of the mountain and onto the Isle of Nex, an open, nonlinear island of forests, swamps and rivers above ground with dungeons, mines and crypts beneath, where four shipwrecked prisoners wash ashore with no idea who has trapped them there or why. The sequel expanded the character system to eight classes and five races, kept the rune-based spellcasting and real-time grid combat that defined the original, shipped with its own Dungeon Editor, and earned a Metacritic score of 85. Almost Human has developed and published both games itself, selling them directly from grimrock.net alongside Steam, GOG.com and the App Store. For players who want dungeon crawling with real teeth, careful resource management and puzzles that expect you to pay attention to the walls, there is very little else like Legend of Grimrock II, and it is here to browse.
