The Servant Grunt is the weaker, more commonly encountered of the two kinds of Gatherers in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. While not as powerful as the Brutes, they are still a considerable threat in any appearance.
Information[]
The Servant Grunt cannot speak properly, owing to his inability to move his lower jaw and his apparent lack of a tongue. They are still capable of emitting a range of guttural growls, hisses, and wheezes. When the Grunt is disturbed with a loud noise, for example, he may make what seems to be a garbled attempt at normal speech, grumbling out something akin to "What was that ?", or "There you are." His visual and auditory perception appears to be unimpaired, however, as they can easily notice Daniel if he is within viewing or hearing range.
Encounters[]
The Servant Grunt in the Guest Room
The Grunt is encountered in the following locations:
- Old Archives (Audible)
- Archives (Hallucination)
- Wine Cellar (Visual)
- Refinery
- Guest Room
- Storage
- Prison – Southern Block
- Prison – Northern Block
- Sewer (Corpse)
- Chancel
- Cells (Visual)
These encounters get truly dangerous from the Guest Room onwards. In the Refinery, the Grunt is not a threat unless one deliberately runs towards it. The appearances in the Archives, Wine Cellar, and Cells are purely visual. In the Sewer, there is one dead Servant Grunt torn in three by the Shadow.
In the demo, the Servant Grunt in the Refinery will not attack you: even if you stand right next to it regardless if your Lantern is on or if you are near a torch, it won't be alarmed. If Daniel's sanity is low enough, an illusion of a Grunt chasing the player may be conjured, disappearing once close enough.
Behavior[]
The Grunt announces his appearance with a prolonged growl or a relatively short snarl, moving throughout the location aimlessly, unless something grabs his attention. When the Grunt stops to idle, he can be seen and heard scratching himself or whimpering, as if crying, or simply looking around. Daniel can withstand a couple of blows from the Grunt, depending on the attack type, and while it's difficult to outrun when it sees Daniel fully, it does get confused fairly easily and thrown off the chase.
Strategy[]
Staring at them will rapidly reduce sanity, so it is best to avoid visual contact as much as possible. Laudanum should be taken if the Grunt hits Daniel, as only a few hits is enough to kill the player. The player can easily hide from Grunts, as they are not very fast or skilled hunters.
The Grunt will have relatively low aggression upon spotting the player initially. If the player continues walking or stands their ground, then the Grunt will not break into a sprint, but it will still catch up to the player easily. The stationary attacks are easy to dodge and run around, but the running or "lunge" attacks are all but unavoidable, as well as a lot more damaging. Throwing objects at Grunts will stagger them for a moment, albeit at the price of enraging them and causing them to bolt at full speed after Daniel afterwards.
Description[]
Physical appearance[]
The Grunt is a burly, eerie humanoid being with a partially wrapped body. Surgical stitches cover the dehydrated and stained skin (likely being a remedy for the aftermath of the spiced wine's bone-tangling effects) and it seems that the various ropes and leather straps are there to help with the otherwise sagging, misshapen and loose (with the most obvious examples being the right pectoral region and the left side of the waist) flesh.
As an addition to that, each step they take produces a leathery sound of rubbing skin. Notably, the legs are the most damaged part of the body, being partially flayed from knee-down, with exposed muscle and even a bared right tibia. The feet are tightly wrapped up, the skin only being visible in form of groggy, torn "crowns" at the hems where the bandaging ends, with the bandaging, perhaps, being the only factor keeping the said skin on the feet. The Grunt's legs visibly tremble as he walks, showing that his either painful or difficult for him to move them or, perhaps and most likely, both.
The head is in a rather peculiar condition, with the features drooping downwards to an extraordinary degree all the way from the forehead, displacing the eyelids and completely engulfing the nose in the process. The jaw became stretched to an absurd length, flapping over the chest. Some of the upper jaw's teeth are either missing or broken, with only the lower jaw's molars still present. There is a number of clumps of grey hair still placed on the head, perhaps, signifying aging.
The skeletal structure of the Grunt's left hand went beyond its natural limits, causing the hand itself to swell up, with the now bared, bloodied skeletal fingers serving as talons for the Grunt to attack with.
| Oswald Mandus's musings on a Grunt's cadaver. |
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The crate arrived this morning, and I had it delivered directly to the workshop. The body is remarkably preserved, although there is a subtle yet nauseating stench of damp and rot. It is humanoid in shape, but has suffered severe skeletal deformity. Remnants of leather straps encase the torso, which is deformed, with evidence of substantial muscle mass and displacement. It is difficult to ascertain whether this unfortunate is the recipient of some barbarous surgery, or was born deformed and an attempt to force his gnarled body into some semblance of humanity was made. What he is I cannot tell, but I smell the Orb upon him, and suspect my great uncle's presence in his curious condition. So it can be done. We can reshape the body into a tool, accelerate the processes of Mr Darwin's evolution. But here my great uncle and I part company. He chose men as the subjects of his experiments, but men are difficult to control and rotten with sentimentality.
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| An extracted paragraph and a sentence from Remember describing a Servant Grunt's hands and the head. |
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The thing rose and stretched its limbs. Its face remained hidden behind the cloak, but its moldering hands were revealed in the silver moonlight. They looked twisted and unnatural. As if the bones had grown past what nature intended. - Its skin had given in to the weight of the flesh and collapsed like hot wax on a candle over the misshaped skull. (This yet another piece of writing details their disfigurements, which again tie-in with how Wilhelm von Gerich described it first-hand in his own, last note, thus confirming once and for all that the Gatherers' creation was caused by the poisoned wine). |
Personality[]
Idle Grunts can be seen and heard looking around while sniffling, scratching themselves while letting out sounds similar to gulping, or whimpering, slightly raising his hands together before covering the face, shaking his head and looking to the side. The servants appear to be all but merciless or, perhaps, simply uncaring in their servitude to the Baron, kidnapping and administering torture to the vitae-extraction subjects without hesitation or restraint. The Grunt who was responsible for transporting captured Daniel to the Cells and locking him in a cell does take a moment to walk up and gaze upon him before ultimately waddling away.
Intelligence[]
The Servant Grunt in the Refinery.
While story-wise they are responsible for retaining the castle, feeding the prisoners and such, they are also mentioned to be not too sharp of mind, "feather-brained", as once written by Cornelius Agrippa.
In-game, the intelligence of the Grunts isn't shown in a bright light, as they have a rather haphazard approach to searching and patrolling. It can even be thrown off if Daniel hides behind a door or other object, even if it was obvious (to a functioning human) that Daniel is still there or, for another example, a Grunt can suddenly forget that Daniel was right in front of him if the later holds an object that would obscure the line of sight between him and the Gatherer.
(An alternate theory is that the Grunt simply has no sense of "object permanence," much like infants. Meaning that if something (such as Daniel) disappeared from his sight, it believed that he has ceased to exist—or rather, thinking of objects existing outside his direct perception does not occur to his mind. This is evidenced by the fact that if Daniel hides, even in an area with only one means of escape, the Grunt does not register that he must still be in the room, as he had no other way of getting away).
Origins[]
With the various (in)direct references to the Wilhelm's words about the special wine's effects on his men (ranging from Oswald Mandus's mentions of skeletal and muscular deformity and more, to how the resulting condition was described in Remember), their origin becomes somewhat apparent - with enraged Alexander of Brennenburg finding a way to get rid of Wilhelm and his frivolous 'retinue' (after their actions start to border on compromising the entirety of the baron's work) while, at the same time, making them anew.
Trivia[]
- The first Servant Grunt you encounter in the Prison doesn't seem to attack you as long as you run away. It will not give chase either.
- While the player can have more than one Grunt chasing after him in Prison or Storage at once, the only true instance of several servants working together remains as the Chancel capture sequence, with a trio of Grunts setting up an inescapable ambush for the unsuspecting Daniel.
Servant Grunt's old concept art collection.
- As shown on the right, a collection of very old first concept arts by the artist Jonas Steinick Berlin depict the Grunt more human-like and wearing 18th/19th-century clothing. Thomas Grip thought it was too funky and resembling the Swedish children's frog character Grodan Boll, so Jonas redesigned this creature to be more realistic and unsettling.[1]
- The Grunt appears to be struggling to breathe in one of his ambient sound files, indicating that it has damaged lungs caused by the disfigurement of drinking the poisoned wine. Or, that it is unable to properly breathe through his destroyed mouth.
- It is actually possible for a Grunt to destroy a door even if it is only a hallucination, it can be demonstrated in the level editor.
Gallery[]
Concept art[]
Renders[]
In-game[]
Close-ups[]
Wide-shots[]
Video[]
References[]
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