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.

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!

This was a pretty good game for the Halloween season.
The thumb stick-based combat wasn't as bad as, say, Too Human, but I'm glad that game developers left the thumbsticks alone when it came to combat after a certain point. It was kind of annoying in this game, it was annoying in Too Human, and it was annoying in Metal Gear Rising with its left stick parrying mechanics.
The combat is overall very simplistic and is mostly in service to the puzzle based gameplay. Most of the time the puzzles involve strategically selecting weapons and power-ups to work around the challenges presented, such as not killing a certain type of enemy of killing every enemy within the time limit. These start off simple before getting brutally difficult in chapter 3.
You can tell this game had a fairly troubled development because the design is extremely linear and room to room rather than the more open pseudo-metroidvania of something like Resident Evil. It feels like it settled on the former because it didn't have the development time to create the latter, and that's fine by me. This game is great because it's short and sweet, a longer and more open experience would make it more of a slog.
The atmosphere is very cartoonish and aged well. The soundtrack is your standard goofy, spooky style of music with some absolute bangers like the main theme and the ballroom theme. The game is very funny as well. Even though this is an E rated game, it's filled with dirty jokes that would fly over a kid's head. The name of the game itself is a double entendre, and there are scenes like Cooper giving Amber the ointment to cure her disfigurement (if you played this part you know what I'm talking about). It's not all dirty though, there's plenty of slapstick, wordplay, and absurdity.
The reason I docked points from this game was that it was brutally difficult in chapter 3 and chapter 4, though chapter 4 was basically just the final boss. It was extremely frustrating, but luckily the difficulty drastically decreased in chapter 5 after beating the final boss, who was the last big hurdle to jump through before your victory lap, saving all the captives.
Overall, this is a pretty good game to play during spooky season. Would recommend, but only if you're up for an extremely difficult challenge towards the end.

I tried this through the Rare Replay collection after years of hearing jokes about it.

It might be the worst Rare game I've ever played. And I was pretty harsh on Donkey Kong 64.

Honestly, I might try it again for shits and giggles at one point though.

I can understand how, in 2003, this being the first game released by Rare after Microsoft bought them was a big disappointment. It's not the A-Tier material Rare had usually been going for, but from the vantage point of 2022, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's very different from a lot of 3D adventure games of the era in terms of mechanics and challenge-based gameplay. But in terms of style and spirit, it's classic Rare. What they were going for with the controls, I'll never know. The modern Rare Raplay version could REALLY use some button remapping.

If this was an indie-developed Kickstarter game from 2022, people would be losing their minds over this. It's fun and charming and doesn't demand too much from you. Sometimes that's fine. Worth taking a look at.

Jogabilidade viciante, é muito legal ficar enchendo os monstros de porrada com objetos do cenário. A história tem um enredo simples, mas é lindamente contada, usando fotos e vídeos que são reproduzidos como páginas em movimento de um livro. A interação com o cenário durante os combates e os desafios das fases são os pontos altos do game. Em contra partida o jogo é muito repetitivo e não há momentos marcantes ou clímax para diversificar a jogabilidade. E também tem o final do jogo - do qual vou permanecer em silêncio - mas é simplesmente BOBO.
Acho que esse jogo me prendeu bem mais do que deveria, vale ressaltar que os controles são super simples e atrativos.

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?

Super Underrated Rare game. Definitely gets over hated due to the fact that it released about a year after Star Fox Adventures and the Microsoft Buyout. It's basically Rare's version of Luigi's Mansion. Main character gets trapped in a mansion full of monsters and they have to escape it by fighting their way out using the consoles secondary control stick. All the designs for the ghoulies are top notch, and while I don't feel Baron Von Ghoul is the best Rare villain, he's purposely 2 dimensional and over the top as the game was heavily inspired by things like Scooby Doo, so in that sense he fills his purpose. Cooper does suffer a bit from bland characteritis, but still has his moments and isn't completely forgettable. Definitely worth playing through if you've never experienced it before. A great game to add to your selection of Halloween classics. Best recommended to play it on Rare Replay where the game was given an incredibly nice remaster and upres for the collection.

The only other game I've played that falls into the "Combat Puzzle" Genre other than classic Doom

This game does a decent job at giving you a feel for its gameplay and rules before tightening its grip with more and more insane stipulations and rules, forcing you to really think about its encounters and work with the environment as effectively as you can

Though this game is ball bustlingly tough, sometimes downright unfair at time, but when you finally figure it out it usually feels super awesome

Its not for everyone but I think its a good time

Few developers have gotten hit as hard by the never-ending console war as Rare. The moment Microsoft acquired Rare spelled doom for the reception of all their future games. It's impossible to undersell how much Rare carried Nintendo during the N64 era. If not by pure quality, then definitely by quantity. Nintendo themselves were slow to put out titles for a console with middling 3rd party support so Rare's unexplainable ability to pump 2 to 3 games out per year was nothing short of vital for Nintendo to not be completely overshadowed by the new kid on the block, Sony. Rare's games meant a lot to Nintendo fans so the moment they jumped ship was seen as nothing short of betrayal and has led to a seemingly never-ending belief amongst the gaming public that Rare "lost their way" once they left the big N.

As someone who didn't touch a Rare game till 2008 with the original Banjo-Kazooie I just wanna throw my hat in the ring and call bullshit on this take. Not all of Rare's games were gold on the N64 and not all their games after the buyout were lackluster. If anything, I think Rare has been an inconsistent developer ever since they entered the scene. Without the nostalgia goggles, it's hard to really vibe with a lot of Rare's output. For every Donkey Kong Country 2, there were 3 Jet Force Gemini.

So with all that buildup hopefully you won't come slash my tires when I tell you that Grabbed by the Ghoulies is one of Rare's best.

Ghoulies is a game no one was seemingly asking for. Rare infamously started development on a game named "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" because 'goolies' in British slang means testicles and Rare were big fans of raunchy humor. Safe to say that Ghoulies didn't have a strong vision behind it, at least not initially. When you first pick up Ghoulies it'll feel like a stew of incompatible ideas. It's a room-by-room beat em up where you throw out attacks with the right thumbstick and primarily pick up anything not stapled to the wall to cave the nearest funny gremlin's face in. There's QTEs, a health system that changes your max HP every time you change rooms, and a wide assortment of Challenges you must complete to progress. It's all admittedly a rather slow and confusing start but give it half an hour and Ghoulies reveals it's hand: An air guitaring Grim Reaper.

See, every room in Ghoulies throws at least one Challenge at the player. These can be as self explanatory as "Cooper(player character) must defeat all enemies" or "Cooper must find the key" and as deviously specific as "Cooper must not defeat the same type of enemy in succession" or "Cooper can only use up to a certain number of attacks". All Challenges must be completed (or, in the case of ones that don't have an end goal, obeyed). What happens if you disobey a Challenge? The Grim Reaper shows up and will slowly glide his way to Cooper and kill him in one hit with his extended finger. This isn't just a simple fail state though as the Reaper is slow enough that he can be avoided (though he will slowly build speed until you likely can't outrun him) and his one-hit-kill poke can also kill any enemy he makes contact with. The Reaper doesn't favor sides! Because of this, sometimes the player might WANT to fail a Challenge and activate the Reaper in order to deal with particularly tough enemies (and there's at least one late game case where an enemy holding a key you must obtain is invincible and the solution to the puzzle IS triggering the Reaper). With how many Challenges there are, some are inevitably going to clash with others. "Don't damage any of the room's contents" isn't a very feasible rule to obey when the same room also tells you to kill all the enemies and one of said enemies happens to be hiding in a destructible object. As a result, sometimes the Reaper is going to come out to play no matter how carefully you tread over certain rules, but instead of this taking control away from the player, it gives them more agency to decide WHEN to break a given rule. It's an extremely "meta" mechanic and not the tired 4th wall breaking "Oh shit! We're in a video game!" kind. It's not common to play a game that puts such a clever spin on such an intrinsic element of the medium.

So while the fighting itself is simplistic it's not really the star of the show. The variety in Challenges is more than enough to keep the game engaging throughout its 7-ish hour length. What many may find lacking is the sharp and crass humor Rare is often associated with. You'd think a game with such a crude origin would maybe have more of a personality but the general story and characters are largely forgettable besides a farmer who always greats you with a different not-subtle-at-all sexual innuendo. At least the cel shaded visuals and campy haunted house music has aged well.

Released in an era where gamers and critics got GTA-pilled and convinced themselves that M-rated games were objectively superior and shorter, linear games were seen as outdated it's easy to see why Ghoulies bombed on the OG Xbox but time has been very kind Rare's debut on Microsoft's turf. In some ways I see Ghoulies as a bit of a precursor to the modern experimental indie games that play with even the most conventional of mechanics. Give CBT a try and play Rare's most underrated game!

Hm. This game is certainly a game, all right. It definitely doesn't feel like it knows what it particularly wants to be. It's like they were originally going to make a more exploratory resident evil-esque survival horror game, but then at some point decided to not do that and instead make a linear room-based action/puzzle game...? The main mansion the game takes place in is designed in an interconnected way much like in resident evil, but you can only go through the doors the game wants you to go through, so it's extremely linear, which is strange because 3 of the 5 chapters are macguffin hunts that you would THINK would allow you to collect in any order you want, but in actuality it just funnels you through its predetermined path. The combat is very slow, as if it is designed to be a last resort that can only attack one character at a time, yet the game is full of enemy clear rooms where the game dumps tons of enemies on you with little to no support. Most of the levels feel more like puzzles while you figure out how to cheese whatever random arbitrary objective the game wants you to do, and somehow succeed. The game also sets your health for EVERY ROOM, which makes conserving health absolutely pointless. All of this culminates in a game that is really disjointed and I can't really reccomend. It has the signature Rare charm to it, for sure (especially in the sound department), but unless you are a really big fan of the company I would say to avoid this one.