American McGee's Grimm, Episode 5
The Girl Without Hands
9/2/2008 8:11 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2
Erin Bell
Status: Trying to keep track of all of my various status messages
Grimm can turn the king's orchard statues against his own guards. Sneaky.
"The Girl Without Hands" is one of the more obscure fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm repertoire, and it's easy to see why. The meandering story just doesn't seem to lend itself well to the videogame treatment, and not even repeated appearances by the devil himself can spice things up.
The devil offers to make a poor miller rich in exchange for giving up what stands behind his mill. Thinking the devil is referring to his apple tree, the miller agrees -- but unfortunately his lovely daughter was standing behind the mill at the time.
Because the daughter keeps crying, the devil can't take her (something about her tears making her clean -- and we all know how much the devil abhors cleanliness). The devil grows frustrated and says he'll take the miller instead unless the miller cuts off his daughter's hands. The miller reluctantly agrees, but the daughter keeps crying and the devil eventually has to give up.
The idyllic wind mill farm doesn't stay that way for long.
The daughter wanders away and meets the king, who marries her and crafts for her a pair of silver arms. The king goes off to war, however, and the devil decides to be spiteful by intercepting the letters between the King and Queen and changing them so that the Queen believes the King wants her dead. The Queen flees, but the King eventually realizes what has happened, searches for her far and wide and eventually finds her, and they go back to the palace to presumably live happily ever after.
It's a very cut-and-dried story, and there aren't a lot of juicy plot points to grasp onto that would make for the same engaging, over-the-top scenes that we've seen in past episodes, like getting to traipse through the Big Bad Wolf's innards as the woodsman's axe cleaves through them in
Little Red Riding Hood.
Blood rain and corpses make for an especially macabre scene.
Sure, the statues in the king's pear orchard come alive and start zapping the guards with their laser-eyes, a pear turns into a giant skull-fruit oozing with worms and takes off off over the horizon, and a cow flies out of the sky and squishes a trio of unsuspecting children playing in a wagon, but it's a largely ho-hum effort. You'd expect the devil to be able to stir up more mischief than some sissy mail-tampering, but it never materializes.
With this episode, the game has fallen back into its earlier pattern of simply giving the story a visually darker makeover without altering any of the core elements.
That said,
The Girl Without Hands does have its one bravura moment: During a battle scene with two armies hacking at each other, Grimm's rising darkness meter gradually causes the sky itself to darken and rain blood. Soldiers who had been engaged in swordplay actually start killing each other and continuing to hack at the bodies as they lay on the ground. It's an effective and foreboding transition.
The Girl Without Hands was not the strongest episode, but I come away from it having learned another valuable lesson about pee: The arc is a visual aid that indicates how far Grimm can jump. Pee first, jump later.
