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!