Growing My Grandpa - An Unsettling Body-Growing Horror Game from Yames (Creator of Discover My Body) 

thanks for playing!!!

Gotta respect anyone who wakes up from a fever dream and thinks "That would make great game!"

"grandpa's desire for flesh has been sated this week" is a great sentence

Nobody else seems to be acknowledging that the mechanics are just like countless other virtual pet games aimed at kids, which if anything makes it more unsettling.

I love how the game's premise assumes a teacher hears this fantasy eldritch stuff and just assumes that it's a projection of her bad home life. It's a lovely subversion of the "never believing kids" trope and in a way that shows the teacher really cares about their student.

Let's see here, a small child exploring a basement full of body horror while their parents fight upstairs. What is this, a rougelite?

The thing that really gets me is the music that plays during the conversations with "grandpa." The imagery is absolutely grotesque, but the serene, melancholy music, along with the rather tender and supportive dialogue in the last section, grounds the whole experience. Regardless of how literal the story is or not, it really sells that Growing My Grandpa is a story about a child struggling to deal with loss and the reality of her parents not getting along. It's the needle that pins the entire game into place.

there's a lot of upsetting things about this game, but what's sticking with me for some reason is the thought of a small child picking up shit like fiberglass and popped battery while digging through trash and grime, all to try to take care of something I, a full grown man, wouldn't want to be within 100 miles of. her parents are unforgivable.

“Only with patience and growth and nurturing does something become what it will be.” That’s oddly great life advice from a potentially eldritch/demonic monstrosity.

Honestly, Yames' games are so underrated it is a crime. I absolutely am astonished by every game of theirs. The uncanny, pixelated graphics that give the games a spirit, brilliant writing and the very concepts of the game that keep inspiring me. It's just pure art.

"There is something that sits at the root of everyone's soul that understands the separation between them and eternity. You may desire something, but you know you will not get it without some movement on your part."

I've really grown to love Yames' work--he's got a real knack for setting the unique mood of his games, and the general theme of finding love and beauty within the grotesque, finding happiness in horrifying transformation, is one that really resonates with me. The monsters of his games never seem to experience suffering as a result of their monstrousness; on the contrary, they are content with their grotesque forms, even happy. Seeing horror defined not by suffering, but joy, is fascinating. I'm excited to see what Yames has in store for us!

Note: This is a condensed playthrough of Growing My Grandpa. I’ve trimmed out a lot of the clearing up trash, some food preparation and about another half hour’s worth of text and optional scientific documents (it’s already quite a text heavy game). If you can handle a bit of reading it’s a fantastic game with a great story, and it’s a Yames joint so it gets VERY weird! :)

so there is lesson of the day kids, be nice to your children or an eldritch abomination will turn you inside out.

"Do your parents fight a lot?"

Yames is with full honesty one of the most genius game makers in history. It's not the game themselves, its the esoteric story-telling knitted together with the blurry, feverish visuals, almost like they were recorded straight out of a bad dream you half remember.

As far as I can tell, this "Grandpa" in the story is some kind of ancient psychic organism that becomes what the person caring for it wants and expects it to become. That's kind of interesting.

Man, I simply love Yames games. The surreality it has, the same logic as a fever-dream, a whole constructed weird world unto itself.

What's so eerie and creepy about it is the fact that it's not just a doppelganger demon that's attempting to pass itself off as a human. It is, in fact, an entity that in many ways grows into the human, grows into reflecting how it is perceived, and the parts that grow into this are genuinely of the mind that they are those things. Only the deeper entity is duplicitous.

Interesting. So "Whiskers" is an undying entity that is capable of "growing" copies of people. It has existed since before the existence of human civilization, and seems to absorb the memories, and knowledge of each person it copies, or it somehow actually pulls the person into being. Depends on how truthful you think late-stage Grandpa was being, in that He was him, but was also the Whiskers and the Whiskers controlled him. I suppose a being with all of a persons memories and knowledge would also think of themselves as that being.