The Legend of Grimrock devs are back with Druidstone, a new tabletop-inspired tactical RPG on May 15th

A beautiful game.  I love these isometric games.

That wasn't the first dungeon escapade I just barely scraped through in Druidstone: The Secret of Menhir Forest, a new tactical RPG from the creators of Legend of Grimrock. Druidstone is out on May 15, and though it's not a first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler, it shares much of the DNA that made the Grimrock games so good. The lush fantasy art style, stirring orchestral soundtrack, and carefully balanced level design all survived the transition to a strategic top-down RPG.

For Druidstone to be born, The Legend of Gimrock had to die. Or at least be shelved for the time being.

"Grimrock 1 and 2 took over four years to make, and we poured our hearts and souls into those games," says Juho Salila, art director for Druidstone and the Grimrock series. "It would be a massive task to make Grimrock 3 and improve the game as Grimrock 2 improved Grimrock 1. We needed a break from that world." The team at Almost Human began to break up, with many developers moving on to other projects.

"At some point Petri [Häkkinen, designer and programmer on Druidstone and the Grimrock series] and I started talking about prototyping games just for fun," says Salila. "After doing several prototypes it got more serious and we started a new company [Ctrl Alt Ninja] to make Druidstone. We didn’t feel the pressure of doing another Grimrock game with the new company."

The Grimrock games sold well enough to help fund the development of Druidstone. As with Grimrock the developers avoided Early Access, and crowdfunding remains difficult in Finland. "We were also not that keen on the overhead caused by the crowdfunding process," says Salila. "We want to make games, not post t-shirts and stickers all over the world."