The Haunted Hoard: Grabbed by the Ghoulies (Xbox)

Grabbed by the Ghoulies, as you might be able to guess from its goofy innuendo of a title, is a game that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. Cooper and his girlfriend Amber come across Ghoulhaven Hall in their travels, a large haunted mansion packed with cartoonish horrors known as Ghoulies. From chattering purple imps and flatulent zombies to gangly skeletons and all kinds of haunted household items, the Ghoulies are all silly twists on the type of horror you’d see in children’s Halloween cartoons and they all serve the insane Baron Von Ghoul. The baron has an been kidnapping children for a while now and locking them up in dangerous situations, Cooper’s goal expanding to stop the twisted baron and his Ghouly forces before he leaves the mansion for good.

 

While it’s humor can be both juvenile in that it can be clearly targeted at children some times and juvenile in that it goes for some low-hanging fruits with obscured adult humor, the game’s generally light tone works well for making a haunted house that is more enjoyable than terrifying. Even though the game takes place in one large estate, the game manages to squeeze variety out of its environments by sending you out into the gardens, into a hidden lab, and making sure that even its regular rooms are packed with objects to give them a unique visual identity as well as plenty of things to break while engaging in combat with the Ghoulies. Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a 3D beat ’em up, but the way it chooses to do its combat is an interesting take on trying to take the genre in a new direction. When it’s time to fight your foes, you use one control stick for maneuvering around the area and the other for directing your strikes. If you push the right stick up, Cooper will punch forward as the player views it, not as he sees it, and all the other directions of his attacks are dependent on the camera position. What this means is that is impossible to ever truly get the drop on the player’s character, as with a flick of the stick they can immediately launch an attack in the direction of the incoming enemy. Maneuvering the camera can be a little odd, but it’s not so bad that you can’t get a good view of the action to start aiming your attacks appropriately.

Despite having 360 degrees of attack angling at your disposal though, your actual attacks are pretty limited. It’s mostly just the same string of strikes and some attacks that are dependent on the state your enemy is in such as a kick that knocks foes away, and in a crowd you’ll have to try and get the game to agree with your intended attack type. Figuring out this unique attacking method does come somewhat naturally, and there are a few ways to diversify your attacks such as picking up objects in the environment to swing or throw at enemies. Every now and then the friendlier members of Baron Von Ghoul’s house staff may also give you a limited time weapon like a soda gun or fire extinguisher that tends to be quite effective for the upcoming room or rooms but needs time to regenerate its effectiveness if you overuse it.

 

A hitch many beat ’em up games can trip up on is their repetitive nature, but Grabbed by the Ghoulies does distribute its new and stronger enemy types well and begins mixing and matching them in encounters to both give them unique feels and to require the player to think more about how they are fighting. There aren’t very many true boss battles however, many of them quickly being slotted into regular enemy roles after their initial special fight, and one particular member of Von Ghoul’s household is dealt with in a bit of an anticlimax rather than the expected big battle. However, Grabbed by the Ghoulies may have figured out a way to make every possible confrontation with enemies more interesting in a beat ’em up, even if the game takes a bit to start to embrace it. The first method it uses is that your health is not persistent throughout the many rooms of the mansion. The moment you enter a new area, your health is set for that room, meaning that even in a room with many weak enemies, you might be in just as much danger as you would be with a lot of health in a room with one strong foe. There are power ups hidden in breakable objects in the rooms to help make the battles more interesting, with health being the most prevalent benefit you can grab but Cooper able to get limited time effects like super speed, instant kill attacks, and a full freeze of all enemies in the room.

The real stroke of genius though has to be the game’s room challenges. Not every battle is just about killing all the baddies you face, as conditions will appear in the top left that must be met for the door to the next room to unlock. Killing all the enemies is the most basic one, but sometimes you are asked to defeat only a certain kind of enemy, only use certain attacks or only a certain amount of attacks, and other micro-missions that aren’t all required, but failing at a mission comes with a terrifying punishment. If you break one of the room’s rules, the grim reaper will appear, slowly sliding towards the player with one finger outstretched that will instantly kill you if you are touched. Death only leads to a full room reset, but in some of the more difficult areas or places where the enemies are packed together, Death’s touch can be a genuine threat despite the small penalty for it landing. The grim reaper isn’t just a punishment for failing a challenge though, sometimes the missions are designed to deliberately call him in with contradictory conditions that you can’t actually meet, and since his lethal touch can instantly kill Ghoulies as well, some areas you might actually want to make him appear on purpose just to use him as a tool to deal with troublesome foes. No matter how far you get in the game, these limitations help to make each encounter unique even when you’re dealing with familiar foes, sometimes even in areas you’ve been before. Your attack options may be basic, but the thrill of encounters comes from how you use them to overcome these special area missions.

 

There’s a bit more to Grabbed by the Ghoulies than the combat though. In some areas, Cooper may come across a sight that freezes him in terror, the player needing to press a sequence of buttons quickly enough to help him overcome the shock or else he’ll lose some of his health. They don’t really add much due to it being just about pressing the buttons the screen shows you, but the other forms of sudden shocks are the more potentially dangerous. While you’re navigating about an area, you may trigger a ghost or other environmental scare, a red light bursting out that, if it hits Cooper, will make him unable to attack and makes him take double damage until he works through the fear. These little traps are one part of the packed rooms that give the areas more character, and the destructible objects in all of them can contain one of the Rare books used to unlock special challenges. Some games tack on challenges as a way to keep the game going after completion, but Grabbed by the Ghoulies’s set of 21 unlockable challenges mirror the interesting limitations of the game’s story mode. Here you are rated on your performance in special tasks that push the brawling mechanics further with more stringent conditions, all of it culminating in the final challenge, a run through the game with a set per room health and no power-ups that really helps you appreciate how the difficulty balancing was achieved in the main campaign.

THE VERDICT: Grabbed by the Ghoulies’s lighthearted romp through a silly haunted house may have simple options when it comes to your actual attacks, but the game manages to still prove to be an interesting beat ’em up experience, partially through dealing with smart distribution of different enemy types, but mostly with its two genius ideas to avoid repetition. Thanks to its room dependent health and the individual challenges given for each encounter, the battles in Grabbed by the Ghoulies are given an extra layer that means even with your simple means to approach a fight, you’re still required to think about your actions and come up with plans of approach. Having the player’s attacks controlled by moving the right control stick is an interesting game design experiment, but it limits the player’s abilities and means the game’s combat relies on those extra conditions to make its combat enjoyable.

 

And so, I give Grabbed by the Ghoulies for Xbox…

A GOOD rating. Area dependent health, fight specific challenges, and threatening punishments for failing them that aren’t guaranteed losses are some design concepts with huge potential for the beat ’em up genre, especially when it comes to diversifying the gameplay while still keeping it about beating up tons of enemies. Grabbed by the Ghoulies can’t see those ideas to their full potential though by also trying to test if its idea of combat controls can work, and while they are functional, they aren’t quite the exciting companion to the other design ideas on display. With some enemies like mummies you have to kick into fires and challenges like not breaking household objects that can be triggered by accident due to Cooper’s opponent-dependent attacks triggering oddly in a crowd, sometimes you can’t quite execute things as intended, and even when you can your options aren’t that interesting inherently.

 

More reliable attack controls and more variety to your basic skills would work well in tandem with the area design and combat conditions to possibly put Grabbed by the Ghoulies onto the path of something truly stellar, and it’s a shame to see its more interesting ideas go down with the ship since it isn’t likely to have a sequel. Had it mixed new ideas with the tried and true a bit more, Grabbed by the Ghoulies could have been the kind of beat ’em up that inspired others to follow in its wake, but the design elements that do work make sure that Ghoulhaven Hall is still a joy to explore.