Audrey is a mouse, newly moved to Grumville with her father, and openly convinced her new home is the ugliest, most boring town in the whole freaking world. That grump doesn’t survive contact with a statue whose name has been lost to time, and Tales of Grumville: A Legendary Pie and A Nameless Statue spends its short runtime tracking what that discovery does to her, alongside a second, more domestic thread, an attempt to recreate a legendary pie her late mother used to bake.
Montgomery and Rocky are the two locals doing most of the work of pulling Audrey out of her mood, and they’re built as near opposites of each other. Montgomery is a sloth with rapper ambitions completely mismatched to his own laid-back nature, all loose confidence riding on a slow, unhurried delivery, and he ends up Audrey’s most enthusiastic and least qualified kitchen assistant on the pie quest. Rocky carries himself like someone missing a piece of his own history, a turtle who wants nothing more than to remember who he used to be before whatever erased that memory in the first place, and where Montgomery pulls Audrey into motion, Rocky pulls her into stillness, into actually looking at Grumville instead of just passing through it.
Mushroomallow Studio, a women-led team based in Bandung, Indonesia, built the game for the NaNoRenO 2022 jam in collaboration with Wenderly Games, releasing it April 2, 2022 for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, with NSAID credited on the Android build specifically. Wenderly Games is the solo alias of writer Jerry Becerril, whose own catalog outside this collaboration includes Assessment Examination, Lonely Kids Around the Cul-de-sac, Notorious, and Hamster Haven, small jam-scale visual novels he wrote and coded on his own, a rare case here of his writing paired with a full second studio’s art and voice production instead of built entirely alone. Mad Scientist handled UI implementation and scripting on the Grumville side, with casslmann credited as an additional contributor.
Cassie Mann wrote the original score and handled sound design, giving Grumville a soft, melodic backdrop that never overplays a scene, while Eliana handled mixing and mastering across the whole voice cast. Vera Tan voices Audrey with a mix of stubbornness and warmth that never tips into whining, Branden Floyd gives Montgomery an easy, joking cadence that fits his rapper ambitions without ever feeling like a one-note bit, and Grant Corvin brings a slower, more deliberate weight to Rocky that matches a character carrying around a history he can’t quite access. None of the three ever feels mismatched to their animal design, a smaller achievement than it sounds for a project built inside a single jam month.
Grumville is populated well beyond its three leads. Mr. Francis, the Fisherman, Ms. Monique, and a resident named Duane all turn up as Audrey settles in, and even in a story this short, each one registers as an actual person living in the town rather than a background prop dropped in to fill out the map. The writing carries a content warning up front for death and grief, and it earns that warning honestly. Audrey’s mother is gone before the story even starts, and her father’s decision to reopen the family bakery in a town neither of them chose reads less like a plot device and more like the specific, stubborn way some people choose to grieve, through work, through routine, through keeping a promise alive with flour and dough instead of words.
The pop art, comic book inspired art style carries the whole thing visually, bold outlines, flat saturated color, panel-like framing that gives even a quiet bakery scene some visual snap. Built in Ren’Py, the presentation leans hard into that same cartoon energy for its cast, though a handful of locations and paintings mentioned across the script only ever exist in text, described in dialogue without a matching piece of art to go along with them, a small hole in an otherwise fully realized visual world.
Grumville sits inside a small catalog of games from Mushroomallow. Kohana leans into darker, more serious territory, and EDDA Cafe leans into romance, and between the two, Tales of Grumville comes across as the gentlest of the three without ever pretending its subject matter is light.
Audrey’s private grief over her mother and Rocky’s public mystery over his forgotten name sit next to each other for most of the runtime without either one explaining or overshadowing the other. The quiet mid-game stretch, where Audrey starts actually helping Rocky piece together fragments of his past long before any answer arrives, carries more emotional weight than the pie plot ever needs to on its own, and by the point the two threads finally meet, the bakery and the statue no longer feel like two separate stories sharing one small town.
Verdict
Tales of Grumville: A Legendary Pie and A Nameless Statue takes a jam-length runtime and still finds room for real weight underneath its cartoon shell. Audrey’s slow thaw toward Grumville, carried along by a sloth chasing rap dreams and a turtle chasing his own forgotten name, gave me a short story that stuck with me longer than its seven thousand words would suggest it should. It’s a small, carefully built slice of life, and I’d hand it to anyone who wants a quick read that still leaves a mark.
