In Defense Of: Rare’s Grabbed by the Ghoulies

There was once a time when British game development studio, Rare, was as inevitable as Thanos. When Rare dropped a game, everybody was excited. Banjo-Kazooie. Battletoads. Donkey Kong Country. Killer Instinct. GoldenEye 007. Perfect Dark. Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Hit after banger after classic. Then, Rare was brought to Microsoft and the Xbox from the land of golden honey that was their time with Nintendo. Their first game under the big green banner? …Grabbed by the Ghoulies.

So, Grabbed by the Ghoulies was an action-adventure game with beat-em-up sensibilities. You played as Cooper, a… teenager(?) who comes across Ghoulhaven Hall with his girlfriend, Amber. The owner of the elaborate mansion, Baron Von Ghoul, is called a “creep,” which makes him mad. So, he does the sensible thing. He snatches up an underage girl and takes off to the bowels of his mansion, of course! Thus, Grabbed by the Ghoulies begins!

Truthfully, the bulk of the gameplay is just Cooper beating the absolute piss out of a variety of monsters and creatures with his fists and anything he can get his hands on. I mean, Rare went for it. You could pick up chairs, boomboxes, pool cues — there were even special environmental actions where Cooper could do things such as swing a pool table in a complete 360-degree rotation, ruining any undead creep that got in his way.

wait, is ‘grabbed by the ghoulies’ some kind of British euphemism?

In order to give some depth to the balls-to-the-wall action of it all, each room of the mansion offered a different “challenge” you needed to complete to progress. Sometimes, that was as simple as “beat everyone up.” Other times, you had to break some furniture or other items until you found a key, unlocking the path forward. Rare made a genuine effort to make Grabbed by the Ghoulies‘ moment-to-moment gameplay as robust as possible!

The enemy variety was refreshing, too! You had your usual spooky suspects. Skeletons, imps, zombies. But sometimes, the game would get weird, and you’d find yourself fighting (as pictured above) haunted televisions or vampiric chickens. (Don’t ask, games of that era were so wonderfully strange and creative, okay?) Legendary video game composer, Grant Kirkhope, also brought his talents to the game’s soundtrack! Listen to this and tell me it isn’t catchy!

Come on. Obviously, it ain’t no Donkey Kong Country or Banjo-Kazooie. But it can still hang to some degree! So, with such an iconic game development studio leading the charge, a question likely makes its way to the surface. “…How did Grabbed by the Ghoulies get a paltry 66% Metacritic score, then?”

rare had its ghoulies kicked in by critics

First, to be fair, Grabbed by the Ghoulies did manage to get some respectable 8/10 scores! Some critics saw what Rare was going for! …Otherwise, it was kind of a bloodbath. Especially considering how, in “Gamerville,” anything below a 7/10 may as well be executed by a firing squad.

Some called the game “shallow,” which, you know… can certainly be the case with a game focused primarily on melee attacks. The room-to-room challenges may have kept the game’s momentum from dipping but so much, but it’s true you can only watch Cooper elbow-drop a mummy so many times before it gets a little tedious.

“One of the stupidest, most disappointing games of all time,” a publication said with its full chest. Now, that I have to disagree with. I’ll swallow the “repetitive” pill, sure. But Grabbed by the Ghoulies didn’t quite deserve that mark! “Disappointing” is interesting, though. Because I’m decently sure about why the game reviewed as poorly as it did.

a ‘grabbed by the ghoulies’ post-mortem

Rare created it. One of gaming’s most decorated, beloved development studios (at the time). To make their highly-anticipated Xbox debut with Grabbed by the Ghoulies was seen by many as a step down from their usual excellence. So, the Ghoulies were destined for the gulag. That’s not to say that reviewers’ issues with the game were illegitimate — far from it! But this would be tantamount to FromSoftware cranking out a middle-of-the-road Soulslike. It might be fine, but in the hands of such talented creators? You expect so much more.

However! Yeah, I’d say Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a solid 7.5/10. Is it Rare’s best work? Absolutely not. Not by a long shot. But it’s fun! Not everything has to be a dev team swinging for the fences every time, right? …Right, guys?