Today, I finished [b]Grandpa High on Retro[/b] on PC through Steam. I finished the entire game and its first free DLC content using Cheat Engine to make it palatable, and slightly less frustrating. It took me about 3 hours.
Grandpa High on Retro is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disguised as a game starring the titular stoner grandpa in his quest to get laid by killing a bunch of feds on his way to rescue a kidnapped woman boss lady that offered him sex in exchange of his help. Yes, that's what the game is about.
As ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as that summary of the base game sounds, the game itself is surprisingly tame, and lacking in both content and jokes and mechanics and varied gameplay and about anything original beyond "funny" "voice acting". The quotation marks very prominent around both of those concepts. A lot of the "funny" is mostly expletives in place of any sort of wit, and the "voice acting", at least at launch, was anything but, as all of the voices were AI generated. A recent update a couple of months ago replaced the bulk of the voices with actual voice "acting", which is marginally better. The voice of the titular grandpa was left intact, however, which comprises the bulk of the comedy, as the lack of soul and intonation behind the "performance" does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the odd chuckle that the game provides.
In terms of visuals and sound, its retro PS1 inspired aesthetic does have its charm, and makes a few of its visual gags land. The sound effects are stock, and the music is oddly epic at times, although it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they were simply royalty free tracks taken wholesale from another project.
Speaking of, the gameplay itself is a repurposed package for what seems to be a fairly unoptimized MMO Survival game development kit for Unreal Engine 5. A lot of vestigial elements remain from what the original framework consisted of, from undocumented weapon customization screens, text implying hunger and thirst mechanics, to one-and-done pointless features such as a dialogue system that is used once in the first level for an easter egg-like gag, and driving mechanics that are used twice but carry no real point or advantage to their implementation, or lack of removal, to be more precise.
The game is inoffensive in its blandness, but kind of a chore to play. As part of the original framework, obviously not intended for single player action game use, weapons degrade over time, ammo takes spots in a barely justified inventory system clogged by functionally useless items, and the need to carry a single unbreakable lockpick, even though replacements are unexplainably provided. These are used to open chests that use mouse-based Skyrim lockpicking mechanics that provide "rare" weapons with no ammo. A sniper weapon is often provided through them, although there are exactly 3 bullets in the whole game for it, and it doesn't do any significant extra damage compared to the regular weapons. Enemies spawn behind or in front of the player in close distances, and what count as quips for the main character, are mostly just crass observations of what was already visible.
However, although most of this still applies to the first free DLC content, its concept, absurdity of the scenes, and overall vibe certainly redeemed a lot of the experience. In fact, the intro cutscene of the DLC did enough heavy lifting into selling me the game in the first place, and although it was mostly still a somewhat inoffensively bland and somewhat frustrating to play, I'd be lying if I didn't do my fare share of laughing at the sheer audacity of this post-game content, as brief and functionally same-y as it was. Finishing this content, left me oddly intrigued to check out the next free DLC when it releases in a few months, if only to see what they do with the equally odd premise it teases.
In conclusion, Grandpa High on Retro promised a lot more than it actually delivered, most of the comedy fits in the trailer, and it's mostly not worth playing, even though, for some odd reason, I probably will. I don't think I could ever be high enough to laugh at much of its comedy, and the game is left, by the nature of its development, feeling mechanically unfinished.
There is a certain 'so-bad-that-it's-good' quality to it, but it's heavily skewed towards the bad side. As much as Grandpa wants to boast about his pot smoking habits, the game, on the contrary, feels ironically underbaked.
[b]BAD ◆⬖◇◇[/b]
