One of your most important skills in GRIME is the ability to absorb enemies. Absorbing bad guys enough times lets you unlock their special traits, which you can upgrade for powerful bonuses to your character. Depending on which enemies you target and absorb, you can gain traits that increase your max health, let you recharge your stamina meter faster, and much more — some of them are pretty wild. And some are incredibly useful. There are can’t-miss abilities even in the early enemies, and we’re going to select some of our absolute favorites.
In my experience, the best way to build yourself is to retain Ardor. Ardor is a special bonus that you’ll gain as you defeat enemies, but you’ll lose it all after you’re defeated. You can retain all of it after death if you get the right traits, and you can select traits that let you increase it faster — combine that with traits to give you damage bonuses, and you’re going to become a killing machine. The best traits straight-up increase your damage output and make your life easier with healing or causing enemies to give you back Breath on defeat.
There’s a lot more traits, and you’ll have to pick the ones you want. Your trait upgrades are limited. Here’s what we think is best.
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Best Traits & How To Get Them
To unlock traits, you must absorb certain enemies a number of times. Once isn’t enough — check the Prey menu to see how many more times you need to absorb enemies to unlock their traits. Certain pray can’t be absorbed.
- Wretch: Damage done is increased by 15%/25%/30% while at or above 60%/80%/100% Ardor.
- Location: Weeping Cavity
- Shell Lurker: Destroying your previous Vessel will now return ALL lost Ardor.
- Location: Gloomnest
- Lurker: Heals on a successful absorb.
- Location: Feaster’s Lair
- Root Walker: Allows to charge up Breath for an increased burst of healing.
- Location: Nerveroot
- Ravenous Rock: Increases Ardor gained from all sources.
- Location: Lithic
- Servant: Increases the healing power of Breath.
- Location: Servant’s Path
- Flower Fighter: Increases Force regeneration speed by 15%.
- Location: Garden, secret room at the bottom of Gloomnest
The best way to build yourself — for us — is all about survivability and damage. Select traits that synergize with each other. The trait that increases Damage with higher Ardor combined with retaining all Ardor after death means you’ll be able to deal significantly more damage all the time.
Root Walkers allow you to hold down the breath button to charge and heal more. Useful for healing a greater amount between combat encounters. You can also select basic traits from starting enemies that give you more HP / Force — but those aren’t required at all. You’ll gain more health just by leveling up.
Keeping your Ardor high and increasing sources for healing makes exploring the later areas of the game much easier to manage. The trait to gives you more time for counters is also incredibly useful for almost any fight. Unless you’re a master at timing, it really does help.