Truly remarkable little gem of a point-and-click horror game just dripping with atmosphere and style.

I'm a sucker for horror stories that blend the scientific and the occult, and this hits that perfect sweet spot for me. Half the game is spent reading scientific reports on a shapeshifting demonic entity, wherein procedural documents instructing the experimenters to don mirrored aprons and masks when interacting with the creature read more like ritual than research, and talk of stem cells, stimuli responses, growth cycles and metacognition is interspersed with beguiling neologisms like "anthropoidic seal," "desirous yield," and "morphallactic nucleus." Early in the game you discover the [original] grandpa's PhD dissertation, and the title alone—"Eurasian Steppe Shamanism and the Fusiform Gyros: An Interdisciplinary Study in Sympathetic Magic"—was enough to make me giddy.

I think what surprised me most was how intelligent and literary the writing was. The game presents you with a whole array of texts from a variety of different genres and modes—from the aforementioned experimental transcripts, to the school counselor's report that serves as the frame story, to the dialogue of the grade school-aged protagonist and of the "grandpa" entity itself at various stages of development, to the visceral and unsettling descriptions of the world as you observe and interact with it—and each is written in a distinct style and register, each evocative in its own way. This sort of layered narration cleverly creates suspense, pathos, and dread by giving the player fuller knowledge than any of the more limited narrators possess (i.e. Adrienne, who's too young to understand the big words in the texts she finds, or the counselor, who only experiences things secondhand and assumes them to be a sort of dream language).

The "polyphonic" narration also lends itself to thematic complexity and subtlety. Many horror games aim merely to scare you or to creep you out, or else they have a clear and simple thesis statement to impart. Yames smartly leaves his conceptual ends loose, but through this assemblage of texts he touches on themes of self-formation, desire, family, loneliness, grief, sacrifice, repression, abjection, bodily transformation, and more. The bar for "good writing" in video games is so low, that it's a genuine revelation to encounter a developer not only in possession of a full vocabulary, but who has clearly read some anthropology, psychology, etc and is able to draw on this to create something conceptually rich that leaves me thinking about it long after its short play time.

I leave off half a star here only because the gameplay does leave something to be desired. This is essentially a fully linear experience with no failure states (though with two possible endings). Which wouldn't necessarily be an issue if the core game mechanic—repeatedly picking up pieces of trash and placing them in a trash bin—wasn't so tedious. The mechanics of interacting with the "grandpa"—feeding him and teaching him new vocabulary—hardly qualify as gameplay at all, and yet the UI itself for these segments is so expressive and original (and disgusting) that I don't really mind.

In short: Growing My Grandpa made my skin crawl and my brain tingle. Highly recommended!

𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐨𝐧
#𝟏𝟒 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐲 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐩𝐚!

You never appreciate good sound design until you hear one of the most disgusting grabbing sounds known to humanity, a sound so wet and foul the mere thought of it makes my stomach churn.

I haven’t played or even heard of most of Yame’s other work until I played this, and the only reason I even played this was from a blind recommendation from a friend and seeing Markiplier play a little bit of it. Now that I’ve finished what is honestly a very short game I can say that it sure was a grotesque horrible experience, and I mean that in a good way.

The reason why I’d categorize this as one of those “experience” games is because once you finish the game there's really no reason to ever replay the game, and it’s core gameplay loop is not really all that engaging; you pretty much just pick up trash in the same 4 or 5 spots and collect items to do the same objectives for 5 nights. It’s not the most engaging game I’ve ever played but for what the game lacks in a fulfilling gameplay loop it makes up for it with an immaculate sense of atmosphere.
The game itself has that low poly look with a grimy crusty pixelated filter coated on so everything looks so crusty it’s hard to get a good grasp on what your even looking at, add in the lowpoly models and some impressive body horror for Grandpa’s growing phases and it creates such an uncomfortable and off putting environment that some of the best horror game’s wish they could create. The body horror is what really sells the game for me thought, watching all of grandpa's growing phases go from barely conceivable lumps of wet and riving flesh to a somewhat human looking figure that still looks too monstrous to be but human. The sound Grandpa makes is even more unsettling, since for most of the game grandpa hasn’t grown its own tongue, lungs or lips so whenever you try to each grandpa's words they either come out as raspy cries or wet incomprehensible throat noises. Any interaction with Grandpa is truly unsettling but when you can have full on conversations with Grandpa is when it gets so unnerving I had to take a 5 minute break because I was having a mini panic attack.

I don’t think this is the scariest game I’ve ever played or hell even the scariest game I’ve played for this marathon, more so it gave me the same feeling that FNAF gave me when I first played it, a horrifying rush of anxiety that caused me to question everything around me and worry much more than I should’ve. But even if I don’t really think the game itself is scary I can’t deny the genius artistry on display here, I’d say it’s worth it just for that first playthrough even if the core gameplay leaves a little to be desired.