"Grimm is episodic," Sanchez began as we took in a seat in a dimly lit conference room. "What that means to us specifically is that each episode is relatively short, so if you wanted to go through beginning to end, you could finish [an episode] in under 30 minutes. But if you want to achieve everything, it can take you an hour or two to get through each episode. Episodic also means, to us, that the games are going to be delivered on a regular schedule so you know when the next episode is due out, just like a T.V. show. In our case, there are 24 episodes that will be broken up into three volumes, a lot like a cable television series: the series might have 22 episodes in a season, but they'll be divided into groups of eight or whatever. In our case, there will be three groups of eight."

Dispersing Grimm in episodes rather than a solid 40-hour chunk is a move that both GameTap and American McGee, head of Spicy Horse Games development studio located in Shanghai, believe makes sense given the increasing age demographic of gamers.

"The average age of gamers is going up, not down," Sanchez explained. " Right now I think it's around 33; a couple of years ago it was 29. As people who want to play core games like Halo and Call of Duty, they get older and have less and less time to play. Episodic is a great way to fit gaming into lives consumed with kids, wives, husbands, jobs, whatever. The idea that once a week you can sit down a complete a game in an hour is appealing to people who like finishing games. That's one reason American was attracted to the format: he's one of those aging gamers, and he liked the idea of a game he could finish."

Another reason: to give individual fairy tales their time to shine... and then darken with Grimm's help. "American also liked the idea of taking each of these individual fairy tales and giving it its own moment in the sun," Sanchez said, "as opposed to each being subsumed as part of a larger whole, as well as the fact that episodes could be distributed on GameTap, which has a built in mechanism for distributing episodic gameplay."

The first episode of American McGee's Grimm, A Boy Learns What Fear Is, debuts on July 31 exclusively on GameTap. "There will be an episode per week for eight [consecutive] weeks," Sanchez said. "Each episode will be completely free for 24 hours after its premiere. A week later, the second episode will come out, and it will be available for free for 24 hours. After the first volume of eight [episodes] there will be a hiatus. We haven't put a date on the second batch of eight, but it will be some time this fall."

With that, Sanchez loaded a playable demo of A Boy Learns What Fear Is, which began with Grimm bemoaning the happy-go-lucky world of fairy tales via a crudely-worded tune. For those who haven't heard the tale of A Boy Learns What Fear Is, a quick overview: there's a boy, and he doesn't know what fear is. To cure himself of his lack of phobias, his father, who isn't really sure what fear is himself, suggests his son venture forth to the gallows where three criminals have been hanged for thievery, but the thieves explain that their predicament isn't so much about fear as it is about learning right and wrong. They suggest the lad take a trip to the schoolyard, where a group of students have been accused by the headmaster of stealing a bell. With nothing else to do, the boy takes off.

Upon arriving at the schoolyard, Grimm finds three small girls being lectured by a rotund headmaster. The girls look sad and confused while a lanky teacher shuffles his feet nervously in the background, a nervous frown set on his face. The headmaster declares that since no student will confess to the theft, all students will be whipped. Grimm steps forward and somehow deduces that green marks on the oddly shy teacher's hands match tarnish marks on the bell. Plagued by guilt, the teacher confesses -- but the boy still hasn't learned what fear is.

He trudges on until coming to a spooky castle. The king greets him and confirms that his home is haunted by ghouls. If the boy spends the night, he reasons, the ghouls will leave his family in peace -- and the boy will be rewarded with the king's daughter's hand in marriage. Believing that ghosts will surely be able to scare him, the boy agrees, but to no avail. The king returns in the morning to find the ghouls gone and the boy as stoic as ever. At his wedding, a loud pop startles the boy into soiling his pants. He smiles, believing that loud noises must equate to fear, and the fairy tales ends.

The tale was effectively told with bright, vibrant colors to reflect the cheerful nature of fairy tale land. Each character moved fluidly and gracefully, like marionettes gently controlled by the sure hands of a veteran puppet master.

"Each episode begins with a sanitized, Disney-fied version of its particular fairy tale. Grimm hates that," Sanchez said. "He can't stand these horribly happy, non-violent fairy tales. So you take Grimm go through the game and turn it dark. That's the basic gameplay mechanic: run around and make the world dark. As you do that, the fairy tale changes. Once you play through all the stages of an episode, you're awarded with a revision of the fairy tale, the way Grimm wants you to see it filled with evil happenings that he thinks are entertaining."

Ready to begin dirtying everything around him, Grimm spawned in a busy town square. Freshly cleaned cobblestones sparkled, and NPCs hustled to and fro, focused on their daily tasks. Standing in the center was the boy and his father, who was no doubt counseling his son on a topic the two of them knew nothing about: fear.

"The interface is very simple," said Sanchez as he leaned forward to point. "At the top of the screen you have a dark meter. As you go around making the world dark, you fill it up. You have to achieve a certain level to move through each scene."

He chuckled as he pointed to a telling yellow stream originating near Grimm's midsection. The urine sprayed out in an arcing line and splattered against the ground a few feet in front of Grimm. "That's a mechanic American carried over from Alice," Sanchez said. "A vile stream comes out of Grimm that tracks where he'll jump."

He stood from his seat and gestured to his computer, prompting us to take control of the evil Mr. Potato Head. Our left-hand rested in the home position of the keyboard, while our right clutched the mouse out of habit. That sort of intuition is exactly what American McGee hoped would parallel Grimm's expressive visual art style.

Sanchez nodded knowingly. "Controls? Also very, very simple. You can play the entire game with the mouse. Left button moves forward, right button jumps, double-click the right button to perform the butt stomp, which has an impact radius that can stun NPCs and spread darkness. You can reach areas using the butt stomp that you can't reach by just walking around. You can also use the WASD standard FPS movement configuration to move around."

Upon clicking and holding the left mouse button, Grimm strode into the town square. The effect of Grimm's progress was immediately noticeable. As he moved, the ground beneath him rotted and cracked, blackening the previously spotless cobblestones. The head of a pristine woodsman's axe lying on the ground became chipped and coated in blood; the heft rotted and cracked. A bucket brimming with frothy water darkened and became filled with blood.

His corruptive nature spreads out in all directions, which, unfortunately, does not go unnoticed by the town's inhabitants. Aghast at their their square's diminishing aesthetics, NPCs standing near to corrupted tiles began feverishly scrubbing with mops and brooms. Grimm's corruption had begun to fill his dark meter, but the citizens' anal retentive cleanliness had begun to decrease it.

Butt-stomping temporarily stuns the do-gooders, but the best strategy is to never stop moving, something which is quite easy to do given that one could simply kick back in one's chair with one finger clamped over the left mouse button, swiveling Grimm back and forth when necessary and butt-stomping in order to spread Grimm's vile nature into those hard-to-reach areas.

Such an area presented itself when Grimm's forward progress was halted by an iron gate too tall to leap. The area beyond was still spick and span, which wouldn't do at all. We launched Grimm into the air with one click of the right mouse button, sent him crashing into the ground with a second, and like a broken dam his darkness flooded over the ground, corrupting everything nearby.

As the dark meter fills, Grimm will be able to corrupt objects and NPCs previously immune to his corrosiveness. Reaching one level of darkness allowed us to corrupt stationary furnaces, which began lumbering forward on stiff iron legs and breathing fire on NPCs who dared to interfere in their master's work. Upon attaining Gross, we sauntered over to an NPC who was too busy wiping away Grimm's filth to take heed of his presence. Luckily, our darkness spread far before us. By the time we reached him, his garb had gone from colorful and innocent to stained and grimy, his face pock-marked and grimacing.

Causing random wanton chaos is fun, and should provide lots of entertainment for completists who work to cover all ground in a video game; but Grimm does have goals to reach. An arrow positioned at the bottom of the screen twists and turns like a compass, constantly pointing toward Grimm's current objective. The goal of this particular stage is to reach a certain level of darkness which will enable Grimm to corrupt the boy's father, whom Grim feels was too soft on his ignorant son. So doing turns daddy dearest into a fearsome red-faced bully who, immediately upon transformation, punches his son in the face and kicks him into the sky.

Awesome.

Our demonstration ended there, but keep in mind that the town square was only one particular stage of the episode. What sort of darkness could befall the gallows, an already macabre area? Tune in on July 31 to experience A Boy Learns What Fear Is for yourself, as well as every week thereafter for each new episode in Grimm's first pseudo-season.