In
American McGee's Grimm: A Boy Learns What Fear Is, we take a darker look at the fairytale of the same name (minus the McGee part) by the Brothers Grimm. In the original story, a boy left home where he lived a sheltered life, to learn what exactly fear was. He traveled across the land, but no matter what experiences he saw, nothing really made him scared.
Well, this tale, of course, eventually leads to a happy ending where the boy marries a beautiful princess. This, of course, just doesn't sit well with our character, Grimm, who will show this boy exactly what fear is.
The premise behind the game is really simple, and actually it reminds me quite a bit of Katamari, but I'll get to those similarities later. As Grimm, you will walk around the happy-go-lucky world and everything around you will turn dark and gloomy. Your job is to get to various areas of the scene, infecting as much as possible until all of the objectives have been changed.
For instance, in the first scene, you have to get the boy to leave the town. You start off by walking around a little garden turning as much of it as black as possible. Everything you turn dark increases your Dark-O-Meter. The more your Dark-O-Meter is filled, the bigger the things you can turn dark. In order to get out of the initial garden area, you have to fill your Dark-O-Meter to Smelly and then break through the gate. From there, you build up more darkness until you can change a log, and so on and so on. Eventually, you will turn the boy and his father and cause the little one to run away, thus ending the first of six scenes in this game.
Actually, that is how American McGee's Grimm reminds me of Katamari. In that game, you can't pick everything up at once, instead you have to pick up easier targets until you've amassed enough mass to pick up the bigger ones. Also you can't make it past certain barriers in that game unless you are big enough, the same principal applies here to, it's just instead of mass, and you have darkness. Oh and while you are dirtying things up, every level has a type of character running around cleaning up behind you, so you will want to darken as fast as possible so you can turn them as well.
The six scenes in A Boy Learns What Fear Is start off at his home village, continue to a place where some criminals are being hanged and then go to a school yard where a teacher has stolen a bell. Then the boy continues his journey to a cemetery which is followed by a haunted castle and finally, his wedding day.