Reader Reviews

Gregory Horror Show (PS2)

by Peej

If there's one thing that we like to see more in a game than a well-crafted and gorgeously rendered utopia, it's a bizarrely crafted and slightly unnerving dystopia, so imagine for a moment if you will a tiny game world crammed into a cubist Bates Motel sliding around on a Twin Peaks kick, where you arrive as a disembodied lost spirit, and are tasked with retrieving souls to trade to Death (sorry, should that be DEATH) in order to gain your freedom. Well hell, it beats "Wind in the Willows" hands down every time, doesn't it?

So to the bizarrely named, and equally bizarrely realised game Gregory Horror Show, which thankfully has absolutely nothing to do with Greg Dyke's erotic home videos, or Greg Proops' various filmed sessions with a call girl named "Miffy" but is based on a Japanese (well, who else!) cartoon show, which I'd be the first to admit I'd never heard of.

The first thing you will notice when you fire up this game is that this is definitely not your usual PS2 fare, in fact you'd be probably asking yourself why this ever got released in Europe, as the majority of odd little Japanese games we'd love to see released over here seldom make it to our shores. Yet here stands Gregory Horror Show in all its cubist madness, tempting us in with some quite incredible audio, some very unique graphical touches, and a set of characters so absolutely hatstand that it makes the cast of your average "fly on the wall" reality show look like well rounded responsible human beings.

"Gregory Horror Show" is a survival horror game minus the horror with the survival part being slightly incidental. You are tasked with a quest to steal the souls of other hotel guests, and this is achieved by a mixture of watching what they do, sneaking a damned good peep through their keyholes, and solving certain puzzles. Once you've pulled off this tricky quest, you then spend the rest of the game avoiding them as they become enraged once you've stolen their souls, and you must run like the clappers, clutching your weak lemon drink and running away for all you're worth. You are aided on your quest by a Frankenstein/Were-cat with the sort of unnerving honey-on-biscuits voice that teeters on the very edge of insanity. Said cat basically leads you through an in-game tutorial to get you started, then throws you tasty titbits of hints throughout the game as it rocks on its haunches, muttering to itself.

Though the game is a lot less about moments of violent exchange between you and the other guests, and more about simple puzzle solving, it merits a look as there are several ideas in it that just work fantastically well and will probably be stolen wholesale by other games companies looking for the next bandwagon to jump on.

So why is it good? I didn't say it was good. It's not horrible, in fact I'm glad to have it in my PS2 collection, it's just that it's a wee bit short and in some parts of the game, a wee bit repetitive to boot, but it bravely stands apart from a bloated market of "samey" survival horror titles which rely heavily on gore and hideous imagery, nope, Gregory Horror Show's style is more likely to throw a disembodied Barbie doll's head in your path whilst telling you an awful knock-knock joke. As you play you get the strangely uncomfortable feeling that there's something incredibly perverse going on beneath the game's mildly child-like looks, an impression certainly not aided in any way by some of the voice acting, particularly that blood-donor-obsessed lizard nurse.

Other survival horror titles that Gregory owes a nod to (Resident Evil, in particular - what is this Japanese obsession with life-giving herbs?) could learn a lot from the control system on offer here, which is blissfully easy to use (would you look at that, Gregory doesn't take half an hour to turn round to look behind him, amazing!) and although the plot is thinner than Homer Simpson's hairline, it's engaging enough to keep you playing until the rather abrupt and quite stingy ending.