While I was trying to get into a group for Stormwrought Castle, I quested my way through another one of Turtle WoW's custom zones: the Grim Reaches. Designed for levels 33-38 according to the Turtle WoW Wiki, the Grim Reaches are located east of the Wetlands and Loch Modan, around where the Twilight Highlands were added with the launch of Cataclysm.
The Grim Reaches are lacking said Twilight influence, but aside from that there are similarities between this zone and its retail counterpart, at least in the sense that it's a hilly green region inhabited by Wildhammer dwarves and Dragonmaw orcs. Visually I'd describe it as a desaturated version of Loch Modan, with similar grass and trees, just a lot less vibrant and kind of dull looking in terms of colour. I'm definitely noticing a theme in that regard, which makes me wonder if this artistic choice was simply motivated by a sense that higher level zones should look less appealing/idyllic or by a desire to strongly distinguish Turtle's world from the way Blizzard leaned heavily into more cartoony aesthetics as time went on.
Regardless, this was not one of my favourite custom zones. It wasn't bad, mind you, it just kind of... was, lacking the clear identity and strong vibes of the previous custom zones I'd played through. The quests from different dwarves asking me to slay orcs, troggs, raptors and murlocs all kind of blended together, with few NPCs actually being memorable to me, such as the crazy dwarf by the lake who asks you to kill crocs and the family of blacksmiths down south.
What stood out to me by its absence was the subject of gryphons. How can a town of Wildhammer dwarves not have a single quest related to gryphons? I'm not saying they need to be flanderised to the point of caring about nothing else, but the complete omission of the subject struck me as odd.
There were also at least three occasions where I was sent into a cave or fortress to kill stuff, encountered a named NPC at the end and thought to myself "I bet the next quest will send me back here to kill that guy" and it was true every time. That's not exactly a complaint, but more of an observation on how devoted to certain aspects of the vanilla formula the Turtle WoW devs are, even ones that have been widely criticised over the years.
At the very northern end of the zone I encountered a skull level elite hydra at the beach, which I thought might be a world boss, though on doing some more research on it, it turned out to be just a normal max-level elite with an unknown purpose.
In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I have to mention that I ultimately didn't "complete" this zone, since I left with two group quests still in my log that asked me to kill some more orcs, but for which I couldn't find a group and I expect no longer will at this point. There was also a prettty large area in the south filled with hostile dwarf ghosts whose purpose I couldn't make out, but maybe that area is part of the intended Horde experience - there was a Horde outpost in the zone that clearly had its own things going on.
One final thing I wanted to note about the Grim Reaches was that the flight pathing to it was weirdly horrible, which made me wonder whether this is something the Turtle devs had issues with. As you can see on the map above, the dwarven settlement of Dun Kintas is pretty much straight east of Loch Modan, with just mountains separating them, but for some reason, the gyphon taxi wouldn't go over them, but instead insisted on looping all the way up to and through the Wetlands just to then go back down from the north, which made the zone very tedious to travel to for how close it actually was to Ironforge.
