Virtual Grappi Review by Someoneman

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Someoneman reviews a Grappi

Someoneman
12/22/2015 08:47 PM
1876 views

Note: This game is heavily based around discovery, so playing the game with no knowledge of it is recommended for maximum enjoyment.

Overview

Virtual Grappi is a virtual pet sim where you take care of a purple blob named Grappi. The premise is that the game comes from a foreign country, and thus all text is either in broken English or an unreadable foreign language, resulting in randomness. Actually, the game is based on a forum thread where Sooz took commands from posters and then drew the results. Note that reading the thread will spoil the entire game.

Graphics

The graphics of Virtual Grappi are retro-style. They're above NES games in quality, but below SNES level. The art is cute, colorful, and has just the right amount of detail for the retro art style.

Sound

The music in Virtual Grappi consists of a short, cheery chiptune that is catchy and fun. The sound effects consist of beeps and blips that give a good idea of the kind of reaction you got from Grappi, and capture the mood perfectly. This is definitely one of the game's strong points.

Gameplay

This is the reason why I did not give the game a score. Depending on your preference for this type of game, it will either be an interesting experience or an annoying waste of time, so it could land anywhere between 2 and 5 stars depending on your taste.

Gameplay is simple. You have a room with Grappi in the middle of the screen, three stat bars on the bottom that represent Grappi's needs, and three random icons on the left side that produce different effects and increase or decrease Grappi's needs. The goal is to keep Grappi alive for as long as possible, and to discover the interactions between certain items. Additionally, using the cursor on items in the room may also cause them to react. For example, clicking on the lamp will turn off the lights. A problem is that there aren't enough reactions between items, and some items feel pointless as a result.

There is actually more to the game, but that would be a spoiler. If you don't care about the game yet, read on. Otherwise, go play the game now, and come back later.

Show

Once Grappi dies, you are taken back to the main menu. If you start again, you'll notice that Grappi is now gray and that the window borders are red. Other than that, the game seems the same, but there's a new item that can now appear: a key. What happens once you select the key will either make or break your enjoyment of this game.
So what happens when you use the key? The game suddenly throws all cutesyness out the window and becomes a nightmarish world. The lights go out and cannot be turned back on, and the items are all replaced with various creepy things and glitchy messes of pixels. The happy music is replaced by an ominous drone, and the sound effects are replaced with static and other indescribable sounds.

If you enjoy creepypasta games, this will keep you interested for the short remainder game, but the problem here is that the game just pumps out as much scary stuff as possible for no good reason. Sure, having a dismembered torso, blood puddles, and maggots suddenly appear in a cutesy game is unsettling, but WHY are they here? After the initial surprise wore off, I found that the game was just one pair of hyper-realistic bloody eyes away from a poor creepypasta. At least in this case, you can actually play the creepy game instead of just reading about it, but still, horror loses a lot of its punch when it's just "BOO! Here's a bloody corpse!" with no meaning behind it.
Anyway, enough ranting. As I said, there's not much left to the game once you reach horror-land. Sure, you get a new pool of items to pick from, but there's no interaction between them. Once you get a saw and select it, the game ends. I won't spoil the ending (although I did spoil almost everything else), but once again it's just confusing and meaningless.

In short, Virtual Grappi is a game that has excellent art and had a good amount of effort put into it, but is hurt by its inability to decide whether it's random and humorous, or if it should contrast darkness with cuteness for horror. While both of these parts are enjoyable, they ultimately end up nullifying each other's strengths, resulting in a game that is interesting at first, but ultimately pointless.