HomeFeaturesGrowing My Grandpa!
Grow your very own grandpa in this wonderfully unpleasant little indie horror gameGrowing My Grandpa! offers just that opportunity
Growing My Grandpa! offers just that opportunity
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Yames
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Yames
I don’t remember much about my grandfathers anymore, only that they were once there and they loved me, and now they are gone. So if I were a small child with quarreling parents and I stumbled across a hidden abandoned lab housing a horrifying shapeshifting psychic lifeform, perhaps I would also try to want this maybe-a-demon to be my grandpa. That’s the premise ofGrowing My Grandpa!, a delightful little indie horror game about feeding, teaching, and caring for “a grandpa-like entity”. It came out in 2022 and I kept forgetting to post about it, but it’s still great so I’m telling you now, okay.
Growing My Grandpa! Is Coming To Steam!Watch on YouTube
Growing My Grandpa! Is Coming To Steam!
Growing My Grandpa! is about Adrienne, a young girl who’s not having a great time. During one of their arguments, her parents send her to the basement, where she finds a grim concealed laboratory with a barred prison cell.Inside, lives… something. Some sort of pulsating bristly black mound. Awful. But Adrienne finds documents she takes to be a book of magic spells, along with a hessian doll and a photo of her grandpa, and casts her wish. Now she just has to help Grandpa grow.
What do you mean, “Where’s the Grandpa?” Here’s right here! Can’t you see his nose off to the left? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Yames
I like the contrast between Grandpa’s plainly horrifying nature and how sweetly dear little lonely Adrienne cares for him. She just wants a happy family again and she knows this is her Grandpa, or at least could be. And besides, she doesn’t really understand the explanations of experiments, demons, and sympathetic magic. Poking around the basement and chatting and discovering quite what’s happening here—and has happened before—is a cracking little horror story. Some delightful alarming writing, too. I think often about “the inner Grandpa” revealing itself. Too often, really.
My Grandpa chores this week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Yames
It’s another game of that best kind: cheap, short (under two hours to reach both endings), and leaving bits stuck in the back of your brain to randomly re-emerge later. Looks and sounds great too. My only gripe is that the weekly cleaning can become repetitive but look, that’s part of being a responsible carer. You do love your Grandpa, don’t you? And if you hadn’t hidden a battery inside his food, he wouldn’t have coughed up- wait, what’s that glimmering in his spew?
Honestly, being two years late to posting Grandpa isn’t so bad. The other day, I postedlovely magical cornershop game Dépanneur Nocturneafter almost four years of intermittently thinking “I really should post this.”
