I had to swing by here, though, to say that I discovered Gregory Horror Show for PS2 and it’s really good. I knew about it when it came out, and was familiar with the whole Gregory Horror Show videos and stuff, but I never played it.
I don’t even remember what made me think of it again, but I looked it up a few days ago, and better yet, I found an “undub” version (“undub” is my new favorite thing ever), that combines the UI of the Western release with the original Japanese voice acting, so I get to hear the fabulous original Gregory voice, but also know what I’m doing (as an added bonus, when the EU version is “undubbed” it often comes with subtitles for free, because with all the EU languages you need subtitles anyway).
I especially can’t believe I never played it before because it’s so similar to Chulip, which I love. It has similar “spying on people as they talk to themselves” and “people going about their scheduled routines” mechanics. I’d love to ask Kimura sometime if he thinks this game was inspired by Chulip, or if there’s another game that they were both inspired by. (I know Chulip was an evolution of Moon, but Gregory Horror seems closer to Chulip than it does to Moon.)
Anyway, check it out if you’re a Chulip fan, and also let me know if there are other games that are similar to both.
EDIT: Oh! And while I’m on the subject of similar games, this has also been reminding me of The Sexy Brutale, which is also about people doing things on a schedule and you spying on them, but which is very different from Chulip. So it’s interesting to think about how this game is kind of in between the two.
I kinda like the English VA. I found it highly quotable when I did a singleplayer coop playthrough a while back. However, we might’ve been going insane with some of the late game stuff that gets super tedious. Unforgettable game.
‘Spin me, spin me! Hurry up and spin me’
I guess Radiata Stories has similar experiments with daily schedule elements but is more of a JRPG overall.
oh! I’ve only played Chibi-Robo park patrol. Is the original Chibi-Robo more like Chulip?
Thanks for reminding me about Giftpia; I should see if there’s a fanslation. And I think Captain Rainbow is also one of those, but I haven’t played it yet.
I should start making a list! Especially since I’m making one of these myself!
Yeah the original Chibi-Robo is a wander around eavesdrop help people game with a lot of colorful npcs and some dark undercurrents, totally in the same wheelhouse (iirc a lot of the same folks worked on Chibi-Robo and all these other games, too)
someone at an indie game meetup was making a game inspired by this and it’s what brought the game to my attention. i should play it, its so weird, surprised it’s not talked about more
You can find written translations for both games here. Unfortunately, I don’t think they ever got to the point of implementing them in the games themselves but I wanna say there are some playthroughs floating around on YouTube with English captions (probably using these translations) from what I can recall…
Great game, and surprisingly fair! I really appreciate that every character’s dialog changes to be hints about how to get the soul from the next character. And then once you get that soul, everyone’s dialog changes to hints about the next one. I also like how most of the characters have character-specific ways to escape them when they’re chasing you, although some of them require expensive single-use items (and I expected the kettle to drive away Cactus Gunman but it didn’t).
Only place I needed a FAQ was the final boss battle; the solution was simple enough that I probably could’ve found it accidentally after a few tries, but it was nice to be able to skip those few tries.
Really interesting, like I said, to see gameplay and design elements very similar to Chulip, and some elements I associate with much later games, like The Sexy Brutale and The Invisible Hours (makes me wanna replay Sexy Brutale, honestly).
With the character names, I wonder if the Japanese names are puns and jokes, and they lost that in translation.
