Publisher: Yames

Developer: Yames

Release Date: 07/12/2022

Available Exclusively On

Have you ever been afraid of your basement or a basement in your childhood? The answer is almost always yes. My parents rented a couple of houses in my youth that had basements. We had an unfinished basement in one of them, and it was scary. I never went down unless someone was with me. Growing My Grandpa! feeds into this fear as you are a child who is having counseling sessions with the school counselor. She speaks of her grandpa as an entity and presence rather than a living person. As you have these five sessions, you experience flashbacks to the basement and what the girl was seeing.

The atmosphere in this game is nailed perfectly. From the foreboding and haunting music tracks to the way lighting is done, it is subtle but really pulls you into the experience. For such a small indie title with pre-rendered screens, it’s astonishing how well this is all done. This is a point-and-click adventure game, so you naturally move around the half dozen screens or so and explore. The girl is originally sent down to clean up trash after her grandfather passes away, but the trash keeps regenerating, and you end up finding other things. There are puzzle elements involved, and you soon find out that your grandpa was a scientist experimenting on genetics in the basement. You uncover many science docs explaining the backstory and what was going on down there, as well as some truly horrific photos and images.

At the end of each day you must feed and grow your grandpa. He starts out as a fibrous and blob-like figure. When it’s time to teach your grandpa how to speak or feed him, the game enters into a first-person view of the feeding hole, and the creature’s mouth appears. It’s truly disturbing despite how simple the pixel art and the animations are. It’s very visceral and raw and not over the top. You can feed him food items found in the basement or other items like batteries and soap to acquire keys and other things, but you must hide these in the food items. You can only feed him so many items per day, so you have to be careful what to feed him. This is a puzzle in and of itself. Then there’s teaching grandpa how to speak. You will find vocabulary words throughout the basement and can teach him a few words a day. As grandpa learns more words, his “inner body” will come out and have more sophisticated conversations with you. This leads to one of two endings. Either focus on feeding and unlocking the mystery or focus on talking with grandpa. There aren’t enough weeks in the game to do both.

While the quest requires a couple of playthroughs, as your first time is spent stumbling through the five days trying to find everything you can, there are a couple of annoying things about this. First, picking up garbage is incredibly tedious each day. Every drawer and area with trash has about a dozen pieces that need to be dropped into a trash can. It’s fun the first time. By the 30th it gets really old. The regenerating trash also is never explained and feels more like an excuse to include some sort of tactile gameplay. It’s also really easy to lock yourself out of an ending by not knowing what foods are in the entire game and where all the vocab cards are. It’s not a deal breaker, but I honestly would just focus on enjoying the game’s atmosphere and art rather than focusing really hard on a specific ending.

With that said, Growing my Grandpa! is a surprisingly raw and dark game that doesn’t overcomplicate the gameplay and allows room for plenty of surprises, scares, and mystery. The entire game makes you feel uneasy and…wrong. Like you’re not supposed to be here. From the unnerving vocabulary teaching minigame which involves hovering the mouse of a grid while the creature struggles to annunciate every vowel and in the end ends up sounding otherworldly and gross. Not many games are brave enough to do this, often hiding behind descriptions or cryptic imagery to get the point across. With its short play time, it makes for a great afternoon of spooky gaming, and unburying this weird mystery is a real treat.

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