What up, paisanos? I hope you're all doing well. Spooky times are upon us, and thus we took it upon ourselves to pick a sufficiently spooky game off the shelf and immerse ourselves in the season. This year we settled on "Gregory Horror Show: Soul Collector", a Capcom game on the PlayStation 2. It's based on a TV show neither of us had seen, nor ever heard of before. I had very little expectations going on, and I'm glad I didn't, because they'd probably have been extremely wrong.
Is it for kids? Is it…"scary" scary? Is this an Animal Crossing creepy pasta? We start this game and it immediately seems based because it has photos of cats on the walls.
 |
| Wait... if you were a mouse then this would be kind of creepy. |
Looking at the art style, I suspect it's for kids …or people with a Tumblr that posts a lot of Undertale and Helluva Boss content. The hotel is nice and moody with dramatic lighting and creepy creaky noises, but then the characters look papercraft.
 |
| Mouse with a house, in this economy? It's a rat with a flat at best. |
So to summarise the set up, uh… Gregory is a tired looking mouse guy who runs some sort of mysterious hotel, where the other guests are spooky animals or furniture or whatever and they carry around little souls in jars which you have to steal off them and give to a grim reaper who's in your dreams when you sleep. And you’re not allowed to leave the hotel until you get all the souls.
 |
| Is he taking us to Hades or Ikea? |
The guests are a good place to start. The game starts simple. Your next-door neighbour is a cat who is a zombie whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. It sounds grim, but they're weirdly cute, and a belly shirt. They teach you the ropes on how to be a creep. You have to be sneaky silent, peek through keyholes and eavesdrop on residents. This way you'll learn what their schedule is, get gossip from the hotel, and what they're all about.
 |
| Stop trying to make "ketch" happen. |
You’ve hit the ground running, we’ve managed to scam the souls out of a couple residents already by making them slip up and then racing towards their belongings like a handbag snatcher. I get the feeling this game is going to get significantly harder and more stressful as the maligned guests persist and new ones get added into the mix, slowly filling the hotel with dozens of patrolling guests who will chase you down on sight and uh… um… they’ll uh… it says here they’ll “horror show” you???
"Horror Shows" are essentially when an angry person runs up to you, and you imagine something horrible they could do to you, which causes you to take psychic damage. For instance the sultry nurse lizard might stab you in the brain with her comically large syringe and drain you of all your blood. Someone with a giant cleaver might cut you into minced meat. A cactus could try to woo you. Pretty standard fears from folks with anxiety, based on judging books by their cover.
Speaking of which… this new guest, I don’t know what he is. He’s called Judgement Boy and he's like.. A robot coat hanger?? And when you go near him he sings “JUDGEMENT BOY!!” at you? I think I love him?
 |
| Note: he doesn't mean his son, he means My Son. |
It took us a while to realise, but Judgement Boy is meant to be a living scale, hanging from the ceilings. He'll ask you some questions about the game, and he'll give you a soul if you get them right. I don't quite get why, but he tries to reframe the questions as a choice between love or fortune, but it didn't fit his questions in the slightest. Whatever! Since Judgement Boy was one of the very few wandering characters in the hotel that didn't hold a grudge after you robbed them, he's alright in my book. Plus I had his dumb little "Do you know my naaaaame~? Judgemeeeeeeeeeeeent!" song in my head for weeks.
So guests seem to come into the house in waves of 2-4 new characters, unlocking another floor of the house for each wave. Also Gregory has a child(???) who's a little menace, if he spots you he tries to “hang out” and follow you around everywhere just to cramp your style. Seems to be you spend most of the time exploring and collecting items, and a lot of books that seem vaguely themed around the characters, not sure why. Oh and this one raunchy looking book…
Gregory's nephew Lil James basically exists to ruin your stealthiness. The game is about gathering information on the down low, and he's there making sure you'll be as noticeable as possible. If he sees you, he loudly asks "What are you doing?" and stomps his feet coming towards you. Anyone you're trying to spy on will be looking your way. It's so annoying. And yeah, Gregory himself isn't much better. He's running Gregory House (no relation), and somehow has a dedicated goon room, which is used for multiple puzzles.
 |
| I'm gonna need a bigger judgement boy for this. |
What we dubbed the “goon room” is where he takes the aforementioned raunchy book if he catches you with it. Anyway what else happened? We were excited when we found the exit to a garbage chute, as alternate routes are critical for this. When we unlocked the first floor we had to reunite a split-personality doll girl and ambush a cowardly cactus in a saloon. You’re really breezing through it, to be honest! Finding hints really quickly and getting mad souls in the bank.
At some point we unlock a basement, which is needlessly massive and labyrinthine. There isn't much room to dodge people down there, so you have to make sure you don't come across anyone you've taken a soul from, because it's pretty much a guaranteed Horror Show if you bump into them. It also houses three roulette-wheel-based board games, each more difficult than the last. You play against Gregory, who doesn't even want to be there. The game itself is almost fully random, with most of the squares to land on being filled with "events". These events either give you an item to sabotage the other player, harm you directly, or in the worst event, you get sent back to the very start of the board.
 |
| Woe is Gregory.. nobody taught him about cheese strats. |
You absolutely destroyed Gregory at it though, he stood no chance xD. Speaking of going back to the start, we found these chutes that send you down further and further into basement floors… B1, B2, B3… how deep does this go? When we found the chute in B3… to our surprise it came out in the garden chute on the ground floor!?? What the hell? Does this place work like pac-man!?
It was really disorienting. At least it also added another shortcut into the main hotel. That gave us another option to access certain hallways from, but even more importantly, it allowed more guests to wander into the basements, making the hallways safer too! Necessary, because some of these later guests were quite tricky. One of them was a father and son duo, called Clock Master and My Son. (Yes, that's his name). Trying to interact with the son makes him shout for his dad, who will chase you and can Za Warudo time for a few seconds like Dio. This makes him pretty scary, but if you take him down, you gain his stopwatch that lets you change time yourself. Unfortunately we did him last. What was a resident that stuck out to you?
 |
| See!? My Son! Family events are a nightmare. |
At some point there’s this chef guy who's a candle, he literally looks like Gordon Ramsay and he’s called HELL’S CHEF? This was made in Japan in 2003. Anyway as we build up more and more characters we come across a problem: sometimes 3-4 of them just decide to hang out in an area for AGES!!! I don’t think there's anything that can be done, you just gotta wait it out. Alright we’re getting near the end game now, looks like there's no more floors…
The end-game adds another Judgement Boy into the mix. He's essentially the same, but gold. All you have to do is find him, and he'll subject you to a bunch of trivia about the hotel guests. If you fail, there's no real harm. You just try again. We got it on our second attempt, and obtained the final soul for the Swedish grim reaper. Either way, with the last soul submitted, you can leave the hotel. Except when you try to leave, the real proprietress of the hotel reveals herself… Gregory Mama.
 |
| Damn she kinda... no, nevermind, she's a landlord. |
There’s a pretty rough boss battle (this game isn't made for action combat) and then in an unhinged cutscene everything is burned to the ground… OR IS IT? Then you learn the truth about the Gregory House, the underlying metaphor. Like.. escapism I guess? And thus concludes our playthrough. We laughed, we learned, we loved. Oh!!! I just remembered it was meant to be spooky. Were we spooked?
Kind of. It's the type of game where you are disempowered with moody shadows and loud sound effects. Everything feels off, and unpredictable, and by playing the game, you make the game harder and more tense. I'd say it's pretty effective at what it set out to do. I won't pretend it's some all-time classic that everyone should play, but it served its duty as a Halloween game well.
 |
| Damn that's so... Ketch. |
