Went in expecting scary, was pleasantly surprised to find spooky instead. It's got the goofy charm of Rareware's other titles, and it actually carries a vibe similar to Luigi's Mansion. It's a lighthearted kind of horror, with British "humor" mixed in for good measure. The Grim Reaper shreds on his sycthe like an electric guitar, it doesn't get much better than that.

Despite taking place in a sprawling manor, Ghoulies is completely linear. Door locks behind you when you enter a room, only way out is the other unlocked door in the room. Approach that door, and you're locked into a challenge, which is the main gameplay loop. Each room gives you an objective, usually along with some restrictions. Complete the objective, and the door unlocks. Break the rules, and the Grim Reaper shows up. Get touched by him, and face erasure. You attack by pointing the right stick in the direction of your enemies and picking up stuff with A. There are soup cans lying around or hidden within breakable objects that you can down for some extra boosts, and you will need these.

So, I like the setup that Ghoulies has going here, but they muddy it up in a lot of ways. First off, your health is "randomized" upon entering a room (I'm pretty sure this is always scripted, but it's presented like it's random), usually limiting your approach right off the bat. No need to be concerned about your health, it'll just be fucked over in the next room anyways. Second, there is usually NOTHING denoting if an object is breakable or not. You're just gonna be smearing your face up against walls while swinging at ghosts, and not the tangible kind. Certain objects contain those coveted soup cans though, which are often necessary to finish the more difficult challenges. Actually, scratch that. The powerups provide a solid opportunity to avoid engaging with the challenges. You'll probably die once or twice in most rooms, and knowing exactly where each powerup is located is a necessary piece to solving each room's combat puzzle.

I call each room a "puzzle" in the sense that you're gonna need to find a consistent method to break through this game's undercooked mechanics. It doesn't take long for each rooms' challenges to double and even triple down on failure conditions. The Reaper can be used to your advantage (there's some light enemy infighting mechanics in this game), but most of the time, the reaper showing up is quite literally a death sentence. These systems are so annoying that the game's "easy mode" doesn't necessarily provide a smoother experience to those who're struggling (or just want to get it over with). Doubling your health doesn't mean a damn thing when breaking the rules spawns an instakill hazard. It also doesn't mean diddly-squat in rooms where your health gets randomized to like, 1 HP.

Man, for Rare's first project on Xbox, I'm just kinda sad at how prototype-y it feels. It left me feeling equally charmed and frustrated. "Fun horror" is a genre that deserves more than a green man with a vacuum, or a gang of mystery-solving teenagers and their dog. Still, at about five hours in length, I don't really regret playing it.

The only thing I really knew about Grabbed by the Ghoulies before going into it is that even Rare themselves mock the game, making fun of it (and it’s poor sales) in later games.

The plot is fairly simple: two teenagers go into a haunted looking mansion, the girl gets captured and so on, but it’s presented in a style that’s a mix between comic book and a black and white film, and it’s definitely very charming, with some fun and amusing characters.

The game itself is very arcady, and I think it blends some classic and modern types of gaming quite well. In order to save your friend (and other people trapped in the house), you progress through the haunted out room by room. There’s only one route you can take at any given time, so you can’t explore freely.

Instead, each room is its own contained challenge. As soon as you enter, your health will change to a set amount that is curated for the challenge within and when you trigger the challenge (typically by approaching the exit door, but sometimes before), a set of conditions will appear: kill X amount of enemies, kill a certain type of enemy, only use weapons, don’t kill a particular kind of energy.
If you fail any condition, you don’t fail the challenge, as long as you kill the required enemies the door will open and you will progress. The punishment for failing is that a Grim Reaper (a rather stylish one, at that) will appear and hunt you down, if it touches you, you die. It’s a great mechanic and in some challenges, you may even decide to purposefully fail as attempting to deal with the reaper might possibly be easier than the challenge.

Combat itself is very simple, the right stick is used to attack in the direction you point, a bit like shooters like Robotron and Geometry Wars. You can pick up a wide array of items from objects scattered across the rooms, which do more damage but break after three hits, and some rooms will give you specific weapons.

Also dotted throughout the level are soup cans, which give you temporary power-ups like a mini version of yourself that attacks enemies, stops weapons from wearing, make you faster or possibly give you bad effects. These are all specifically placed, and sometimes finding these are vital for being able to beat a room. If the game puts you against many strong enemies you have to kill, there’s probably a one-hit-kill soup somewhere in the room.

Enemies are also varied and wonderful, from simple imps (which I’m sure are Jinjos) to mummies that cast curses and exploding worms. Each enemy behaves in a certain way, and understanding how they act is important to progressing.

Grabbed by the Ghoulies is fairly short, but also features extra challenges to complete. These are unlocked by finding a Rare Tome in each room. Unfortunately, sometimes these can be a pain as the game will sometimes automatically move you to the next room. On top of this, when you return to a previous room (which will have a new challenge), a new book will appear, so you are likely to miss some, but thankfully there’s a replay option to help pick these up.

I can see why Grabbed by the Ghoulies wasn’t a big seller, as it’s quite a unique game, but there is a lot to enjoy about the game.

I've now run through this game twice and I think my second run has really cemented my opinion of this game: a great concept with a pretty flawed execution. Starting out both times I thought to myself "this isn't as bad as I remembered" but it's the back half of this game that is the real bastard. The twin stick control, while odd, isn't the problem. The problem is the challenge modifiers, that's where, to use a British phrase here, the game really starts to take the piss. An example is a room where the game is asking me to find a key hidden in the room, another key guarded by an enemy and to not kill any skeletons. The problem arises where the key is guarded by a vampire who hides in her coffin and can't be damaged until she opens the lid but just refuses to do so. My solution then was to find and kill the skeleton, prompting the game to spawn the one hit kill Grim Reaper as it always does when a challenge is failed, and kite him to the vampire, killing her and releasing the key. There are many such instances in this game and rather than being fun challenges to keep things fresh they just become annoyances that turn the game into a slog. Telling the player what to do but then hindering their means of doing it isn't my idea of fun. This is, in my opinion, another instance of Rare coming up with a fun conciet but absolutely fumbling just about everything else.

The enemy design is fun at least?

What Banjo-Kazooie was to Super Mario 64, Grabbed by the Ghoulies was trying to be for Luigi's Mansion: Rare's (specifically the Mayles team's) spin and progression of Nintendo's launch title, exploring what was possible on next-gen hardware through a simple treatise on basic beat-'em up mechanics wrapped up in a silly, spooky narrative. The problem Ghoulies ran into, and the reason it's not-so-well-remembered, is that it was delivered out of context. The Mayles team developed it as a low-stakes cool-down project following Banjo-Tooie. It probably would've done fine on GameCube, maybe reading as an also-ran around whatever Donkey Kong and Sabre Wulf projects Rare was developing concurrently. But Microsoft acquired Rare, and the Luigi's Mansion-analogue became Rare's Xbox debut, when all eyes on it expected a Super Mario Sunshine- or maybe even Wind Waker-analogue. No cool-down project should have that type of pressure on it.

Ghoulies is a pretty great time, honestly! "Twin-stick beat-'em up" sounds like an odd high-concept to wrap your head around, but it's actually quite straightforward: Cooper's moveset is extremely unimportant, with all the different animations largely existing for flavor more than anything. The focus is instead placed on crowd control - something always present in beat-'em ups but usually more as a consequence of level progression and managing enemy spawns more than anything. The game actually gets a good deal of mileage out of it even before the gameplay modifiers, as you fall into a pretty good rhythm weaving around enemies, trying to manage different enemy classes' attacks and patterns. For a somewhat more contemporary analogue, I'd compare it to something like One Finger Death Punch or Kung Fury: Street Rage, just in 3 dimensions.

But those gameplay modifiers are the heart and soul of the experience, and what keeps it from getting too repetitive over its one-hundred rooms. How they're paced out is great fun, too. The fluctuating hit point total makes for a great tone-setter for each room (though, if the mad Baron can just mess with Cooper's HP like that, why doesn't he just leave him at 1 the whole game? Ah well, we wouldn't have a game otherwise). Sometimes you have a special weapon, and managing its heat gauge becomes part of the challenge. On top of all this, most rooms have additional modifiers too, like "Only defeat X type of enemy", "Don't take damage", "Don't damage the environment", etc. Always interesting to see what challenge the game will offer next, and try to figure out how you're expected to see it through.

Or... you can always fail the challenge, since losing the challenge doesn't mean starting it over. It just means that the Reaper has entered the playing field. Touching the Reaper means instant death, but maybe you can avoid him while you wrap up what you have to do? I always always love the extra challenge a game gets out of having a playable fail state, where you can salvage a botched run despite the odds being stacked against you. Tying it into the Grim Reaper, in the same way Persona 3 would do a couple years later, makes it all the sweeter to me.

Also, is the Reaper here a repudiation of Gregg the Grim Reaper from Conker, or is Gregg the Grim Reaper Chris Seavor taking the piss on Gregg Mayles for wanting to have a reaper in his next game? You decide.

Grabbed by the Ghoulies isn't a favorite game of mine, but it's one where I feel it easily could be. The more I sit on it, the more fondly I find myself thinking about it, and the more fun and clever I find its design decisions. I think the game's undergone a bit of a critical re-examination following Rare Replay, which I think it was due; I'm certainly grateful Rare Replay gave me the chance to play it in the first place!