12 Games of Christmas: The Grinch (Game Boy Color)
Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas lends itself quite easily to a video game adaptation. The player can delight in being naughty as they play through the Grinch stealing all the Christmas presents and decorations, and since it is a redemptive story, they get to technically play as the protagonist when the grouchy green creature has his change of heart near the end. Like most licensed games, it could have just been made into a typical action platformer, and it seems it was for Dreamcast and PlayStation, but Konami must have been inspired when they made the Game Boy Color Grinch game, as it turns out to be remarkably well conceived for a Christmas game based on a Dr. Seuss property.
The Grinch is a top-down maze game, but it would be a disservice to its ideas to simply compare it to Pac-Man like many publications seem to have done. With a healthy stock of over 30 levels that can even be multi-floor or made up of plenty of screens, The Grinch is definitely trying to be a full-fledged game. Your objective in a stage is to navigate around as either The Grinch or his dog Max and collect all the presents in the level, but the different screens of a level are packing plenty of challenges that stand in your way. The Whos of Whoville are out enjoying Christmas, and if they manage to spot the Grinch, they’ll come running towards him to try and… hug him and turn him into a good guy before the story reaches its natural climax. Some are certainly more aggressive about their methods, such as policemen and kids who will peg you with a snowball to stun you or the robots found in the junkyards that shoot stun blasts, and the guard dogs don’t seem quite as friendly, but it is still cute the game tries to frame its enemies as kind instead of killer. However, there are some Whos will run away from you and cower instead, their screams alerting other people nearby to come chase you as the cowering character likely blocks a decent channel for your escape.
The best approach to avoid having the Grinch’s heart expand prematurely is to employ stealth. Levels feature many walls, fences, and other barriers that characters can’t see you over. Watching Who walk cycles and acting when you have an opening is crucial to getting through the game, but there are some ways to deal with the more persistent or deviously placed characters on your present hunting quest. If you are spotted, you actually get a speed boost that means you can usually outrun them if you have the space, pursuers tiring after a bit and forgetting you were there. You can have characters chasing you run into each other for a brief stun on both, but sometimes it might be wiser to just leave the screen and come back with everyone calmed down. The Grinch can slink under certain objects other characters can’t by crouching and crawling, the maneuver a little awkward due to strange responsiveness issues but it opens up new escape routes that mean sometimes you can just let a character detect you, grab any presents or keys to open doors, and then sneak out beneath a table or similar object. Worst case, if you absolutely cannot outmaneuver a character, The Grinch can scoop up snowballs from the ground and hurl them to stun people for a time. You can’t replace snowballs if you’re not standing on snow though, something used to devious effect in later levels where there might be some space between difficult Who arrangements and the nearest patch of snow, and since enemies are never fully defeated, you can’t just collect snowballs and clear a path forward. To mitigate some of the difficulty though, the presents you’ve collected in a stage will remain collected if you do get caught. If you do run out of chances and hit a Game Over though you will need to collect them all again, but the game will let you instantly restart the same stage if you reach that point.
The Grinch continues to mix up its level design quite well, upping the difficulty and complexity of its basic play the further you get in. Labyrinthine levels where you need to open new paths and find the safest route forward keep the Grinch’s regular levels fun throughout although the timer is a bit of a bother. Stages all have time limits that, while possible to add more time to with the right pick-ups, can prove to be a common cause of death as you need to learn the level and your approach before you can do it within the limitations placed on you. Losing isn’t too painful as mentioned though, but the time crunch doesn’t seem to do much in a game that already had plenty of good level design and opposition to be challenging even if you were free to explore at your own pace. Levels can be teeming with presents, nearing 100 in some later stages, but the fact each screen is a small challenge to get to them and avoid the Whos actually produces a pretty quick pace to the gameplay already. You need to be fast to get around safely, only need to grab presents on most screens, and then can move on to see what lies ahead.
While stages where you play as The Grinch are the norm and it is the design best iterated on, there are a few more level types, the game’s seven “Scenes” containing multiple levels that match the gameplay type on feature. Max the dog gets two Scenes as the player character, the dog unable to throw snowballs and thus having to find another way to stop anyone from catching him. Surprisingly though, he is much better at doing so than his owner. While his action button normally jumps to get over people who might try and catch him, if he crouches, he can bark, every other character on screen immediately stunned so long as they haven’t already spotted him. There is no limit on how often you can do this, and besides the awkwardness of the crouching to execute it, you can get through almost all of Max’s first Scene by just barking constantly and grabbing the presents while characters are unable to touch you. It’s slow going and not too fun but incredibly effective, but the next time around with Max it does actually challenge this overpowered tactic. Ice patches are introduced that Max needs to slide across to get to different parts of the level, meaning he can’t bark while slipping across them. The bark will still prove incredibly useful, but it can’t be blindly relied on or you might end up sliding into a dog whose stun wore off while you were on ice.
The other gameplay variation featured are the kart levels. Very few are featured, but these are essentially The Grinch’s levels but instead of going on foot through the mazes, you drive around in a vehicle that needs to pick up speed to move quickly and can be easy to drive into trouble. It’s a bit unwieldy but something that can be overcome with careful approaches, and you do pack snowball attacks just like when on foot except this time around you need to rely on snowball pickups rather than making them yourself. These snowball pickups appear in regular levels at times too, especially in the levels where The Grinch dons Santa’s red costume and sneaks around exclusively indoor locations. It is a bit of a shame the kart and dog deviations are a bit worse than regular play, but it’s definitely not enough to dampen the surprisingly solid level design. Even in Max and Kart levels you still see the game whipping out new arrangements of Whos and barriers that encourage this interesting mix of stealth and maze navigation.
THE VERDICT: Konami created a remarkably solid maze game in The Grinch, diverse layouts and stealth elements constantly evolved and toyed with as you push through a hearty selection of unique levels. The stages where you play as The Grinch ask for smart movement and proper plans of action, but Max’s ridiculously effective bark and the quirky controls in the Kart stages mean the deviations from the core gameplay, while sometimes decent, don’t match the craftsmanship of the main style. Surprisingly enjoyable with its smart approach to using the license, The Grinch shows that good games can be found in even the strangest of places.
And so, I give The Grinch for Game Boy Color…
A GOOD rating. I feel there must be some Konami maze game style I’ve yet to encounter that was adapted for use here, or maybe this gameplay ideas was kicking around in the heads of some developers at the company. Perhaps this was a natural adaption of elements from the old Metal Gear games that do employ similar stealth mechanics. It’s strange to think The Grinch got such a well-realized gameplay style that not only matches the story of its source material well but provides a uniquely enjoyable experience in the era where most licensed games were becoming laughably mediocre or downright bad. It is certainly not a phenomenal game, and things like Max’s bark and the weird issues with crawling show that there still some stumbling points, but the majority of the game has a steady, challenging difficulty progression that continues to introduce new ideas like teleportation pads and limited snow availability to ensure its more complex mazes are also providing fresh variables to consider. It stokes the brain the same way a puzzle game might while being more fast-paced than somewhat similar games like Mole Mania.
While I try to avoid overuse of the phrase “hidden gem”, and certain people certainly expect a bit more shine to a gem before considering it, The Grinch still provides a much more enjoyable experience than one might expect considering its license. Konami didn’t treat it as a simple Christmas cash-in, meaning it can even be enjoyed by those who would otherwise have no interest in an adaptation of a Dr. Seuss story.