Gregory Horror Show is basically the best budget cartoon Resident Evil to ever exist. I say this out of admiration more than anything else: in a year where Capcom Production Studio 3 appeared to have mixed success with the ambitious but ultimately hollow Glass Rose and the infamous Mega Man X7, it was this overlooked horror-mystery title based on a Japanese CGI anime that thoroughly proved that they still had the sauce. Not only was it a solid return to their roots, it logically expanded off of Resident Evil’s base model in ways that are seldom realized even to this day.

The story goes like this: you’re a kid lost in a foggy forest, finally finding shelter at Gregory House, only to realize in a dream with Death that you’ve ended up in videogame purgatory along with a slew of other troubled inhabitants. Death proceeds to strike you a bargain; if you can bring him the twelve lost souls carried by the various inhabitants, he’ll show you the way out. To do so, you must discover every inhabitant’s weak point and expose them, taking their souls when vulnerable while staving off insanity during the endlessly looped day.

However, there’s a catch. Gregory Horror Show intentionally disempowers the player: there’s no combat to be found, and every guest is capable of running faster than you. They don’t particularly appreciate being spied on, and will immediately take notice if they’re alerted to your presence and skedaddle. As such, the player must rely upon sneakily gathering information by chatting up non-hostile helpers, and spying upon cagey guests by peeping through door keyholes, hiding around furniture/corners, and carefully creeping behind them as they roam around the hotel. This results in a surprisingly intimate experience despite Gregory Horror Show’s brevity: you really get to know the habits and quirks of each guest, carefully marking down your observations in a journal, before finally going in for the kill.

This is where the game really starts to come into its own: after robbing a guest of their soul, they immediately become hostile and if they catch you, will subject you to a “Horror Show” that significantly cuts into your health. It’s no simple task to evade capture once spotted by a hostile, because the player has to duck into other rooms unspotted and take cover in safe rooms or hide in closets/under tables to escape detection. Furthermore, as your cache of purloined souls builds up, more and more guests check into the hotel, further complicating traversal and observation. Thus, while most horror games become safer and easier to manage due to mastery of environments and clearing out enemies along the way, Gregory Horror Show instead organically escalates its difficulty by enforcing tighter timeframes and more meticulous planning to evade angered inhabitants while still gathering information upon new guests, resulting in an increasingly tense and unsettling experience. This is all while the player must also manage their constantly depleting mental health gauge from the simple act of staying awake and scour for items around the mansion in order to trade for necessary health and key items in Gregory’s Horror Shop. All these systems work together to hold the player accountable for plotting out constantly evolving routes throughout the hotel as more rooms/passages and guests are thrown into the mix, alongside the need to keep track of how these guest schedules interact, with their positions constantly shifting over the course of the 24-hour cycle. In particular, it becomes crucial to ensure that the player can safely make it to fortune-telling rooms (only two of which exist in the mansion) to save the game and sporadically return to the player’s guest room to swap/store items, check the player’s journal for recorded guest actions, and take naps to progress time, cure exhaustion, and secure the capture of lost souls. The latter presents a risk-vs-reward exercise in-itself: the player can temporarily keep captured souls on them in any given day to reduce the rate of mental health deterioration, but if the original owner should find them, they’ll lose the lost soul and will have to repeat the process anew.

The result of this intersection between stealth, observation, and horror is perhaps one of the most intricate exercises of sheer patience and planning in any video game I’ve ever played. Granted, Gregory Horror Show is not a masochistic game by any means, but it nevertheless forces players to consider the totality of their actions at any given time while paying dividends if they're willing to do their homework by nailing down the who, where, and when. In this sense, it’s one of the best evolutions of survival-horror, because despite how much it differs from its influences, it understands that time itself is the most important resource to conserve. Failing to perceive exactly how the different elements of the haunted mansion interact can feel quite punishing, not just due to drastic drops in stamina but also likely resulting in significant time losses that can cause the player to miss their striking window of opportunity. The player must then find alternative methods to effectively waste time through costly "Fruits of Time" (that damage your Mental Gauge)/occasionally sleeping and potentially encountering more hostiles until the events of the time loop roll around for another try.

I’ll concede that Gregory Horror Show isn’t an obvious contender for the greatest horror game of all time. There are a couple elements that could be construed as superfluous since they don’t add anything to the stealth-observation premise, such as a Mario Party-esque board game that the player must win for a lost soul, as well as a “boss-battle” amongst many other scripted events during the final night. That said, they’re mere blemishes in the overall scope of things, and are easily forgiven considering the game can be beat in about five to seven hours. Although Gregory Horror Show doesn’t quite rise to REmake's level of resource management mastery, it remains one of the most distinctly charming and succinct takes on the survival-horror genre that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do in its brief runtime, while daring to innovate upon an already revolutionary and tightly packaged standard. I’ve never seen or heard of its source-material prior to this game, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t one of the most effective ways to spark my curiosity. Perhaps that speaks for itself more than anything: even if you’re not a fan of the franchise, you owe it to yourself to check out what I’d say is outright one of the best titles on the PS2 in an already stacked era of exciting and wildly creative works.