Who the Fuck Ate Grandma? review

• Reviews by Lizzie Frizzle
• Published:

Serves up a spicy slice of twisted plot, crude jokes, simple puzzles and fun classic adventuring

Few experiences are more universal than the awkward annual dinner you’re forced to attend with your terrible relatives. Be it the holiday season or your grandmother’s 93rd birthday party, for many a family function is not something to be enjoyed but survived, both figuratively and – as is the case in Who the Fuck Ate Grandma? – literally. Solo developer Benjamin G’s debut release tasks you with answering its titular question by solving puzzles, poking at old family drama, and point-and-clicking your way through a darkly comedic, utterly twisted story that packs plenty of surprises into just a 3 ½ hour runtime. Though a lack of overall polish, along with the absence of familiar genre staples like item combination, snappy dialogue, and voice acting keep the game from feeling fully baked, the exciting plot, excellent soundtrack, and charmingly retro pixel art are all cooked to perfection.  

As the game begins, the birthday party already has. With the whole family gathered to celebrate Grandma, her house is lively if you ignore her horrific death. The tutorial intro gives you a chance to catch up with everyone, like your three brothers: gun-toting Bertrand; Rene the vegan sausage chef; and Henri, who worships a fashionable rat named Pikwik he thinks he saw under his fridge once. Your sister Josiane is annoyed that you haven’t returned her calls in a year, her husband Gustave is annoyed because he hates his wife’s weird siblings, and their son Toby is annoyed because he’s just at that age. Chirac the family dog is eating everything, and old man Roger spends the entire game asleep sitting up on the couch, his connection to the rest of the group never explained.

Your own name isn’t uttered even once, but with so many others to keep track of, that might be for the best. At 35, you’re not the oldest in the bunch, but those dark circles under your eyes, your half-brushed hair, and your unbuttoned shirt aren’t the picture of a man in his prime, either. (Your relatives agree.) The only person missing is the birthday girl herself, and as soon as someone’s hungry enough to lift the big silver cloche that’s starting to attract flies, you’ll realize that Grandma has actually been at the party the whole time… Who served Gram to their fam like a ham? Everyone is a suspect, including the dog.

The only tools to solve this heinous who-oven’d-it are your two mouse clicks, used to examine objects or people, pick them up (just the objects), and talk to them (just the people). Grandma’s living room is party central, but you also gain gradual access to her kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, backyard, and a few other places. Most areas are just a single screen, but the backgrounds are all drawn in colorful 2D pixel art, elevated by a cartoonish, angular style that invokes the 1991 setting, as do other visual details like the old-school gaming console Toby left lying on the floor.

Each scene is full of hotspots to inspect, from paintings of three-headed monkeys to Gram’s bloody head, still wearing her glasses, her hair up in a bun. Even as your inventory fills with paint cans, harmonicas, and other mundane items, the insane inciting incident is always looming: several hotspots lead to dialogue about Grandma’s gruesome end, human remains clog the pipes, the oven smells like death. Needless to say, the squeamish should steer clear, though nothing is at all realistic.

Your inventory is always accessible to take stock of what you’ve acquired from around the house, but some items can’t be pocketed until you need them, forcing you to remember your surroundings and revisit rooms often. The realization that an object you initially assumed would contribute to a puzzle but couldn’t pick up is about to contribute to a puzzle never ceases to satisfy, and for when you inevitably forget about something you examined that’s suddenly relevant 90 minutes later, an in-depth hint system is accessible via your inventory. From starter tasks like grabbing a glass of water in the fridge to more involved late-game sequences, every puzzle is catalogued in a list that updates as you play. You can choose between getting a clue or being told exactly what to do, and before it comes to either, the main character also mentions when you’ve got the right idea but the wrong steps. With so much help available, it’s hard to get stuck, but it’s easy to accidentally spoil plot points that appear in the hint list before you get to them in the story, which is what happened to me the one time I needed some assistance.

Who the Fuck Ate Grandma?

Genre:	Comedy, Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Crime solving, Family, Whodunit
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Investigative, Puzzle
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

For many longtime genre fans, help likely won’t be necessary because most puzzles are straightforward. You’re outright asked to get that glass of water from the fridge; it’s the first of several solutions plainly stated in dialogue. Without the ability to combine items or alter most of them in any way, puzzles often require very few steps, like finding cockroach-infested oatmeal, then taking it to the person who told you that they’re allergic to cockroach-infested oatmeal. But cracking one puzzle usually rewards you with the missing piece to finish another, and the momentum gained from quickly chaining simple solutions together complements the urgency of needing to figure out who put Grandma on the menu.

Still, when the gameplay is so minimal, it can seem like you’re a passenger in your own save file. After finding an unknown combination, then the safe it unlocks, the main character instantly opens it. You don’t need to enter the combo into anything or even remember it. Same goes for part of the final puzzle: Instead of challenging you to recall the right information to complete the game, the protagonist offers you multiple reminders. Early on, a chest x-ray is used as a map so that you can drive a remote-control car out of someone’s stomach, but once again, it’s your character who does all the work, animating slightly within an otherwise static scene.

While not impacting gameplay, other times character animations include extra erroneous frames. Your arm could abruptly jut out to one side after an object interaction, or you might quickly turn in place at the end of your sentence. In fact, a consistent lack of quality control seeps into several parts of the game. Though the soundtrack itself is outstanding, with bouncy piano, curious marimba, and an appropriately zany main theme, the extended silence while songs restart is not. Without any voice acting to mask them, the silences aren’t just long, either, they’re loud.

That none of the cast is voiced feels like a cruel trick, partly because a trailer is narrated by the protagonist with no indication that the performance won’t continue in the actual game. Mostly, however, it’s because everyone is so visually distinct and strange, I want to know what they all sound like! Between mismatched, crooked eyeballs, Coke bottle glasses, unkempt brows, and horrible haircuts, each character looks unique yet cohesive as one hopelessly unstylish family. Not only would voice acting bring the group to life (except for Grandma, who’s dead), it would also improve quality of life for the player. The game is dialogue-heavy, and though you can click through to hurry things along, much of it is necessary to solve puzzles or progress the story.

Not only would voice-overs make reading more engaging, it would make the awkward writing seem more natural. The English translation is stiff and can be confusing. In a puzzle about finding a specific prize within a pile of billions of cereal boxes, you need someone with “real flair” to help. Not getting how that’s useful in a needle-in-a-haystack hunt, and thinking my goofy relatives thoroughly pizzazz-less, I headed to the hint list for help. When I found out who the flair-haver was, the lightbulb floating above my head never lit up with understanding. Repetition and contradictions, like the protagonist wondering where an item is even if it’s already in your inventory, also add to the clunkiness. Upon release, the game’s Steam page disclosed that AI was used to “validate some translations” as well as “generate a few short audio snippets,” and though that text has since disappeared, it could explain some of the script’s problems.

Other issues aren’t a matter of translation, but taste. I expected crude humor when I decided to play a game with a curse word in its title, but I wasn’t anticipating the ability to murder hamsters with a hammer and endlessly kick a swing into Chirac the dog, even if you’re told he “seems to enjoy it,” or a line about “sexually using” him. In the main character’s defense, he’s not interested, but another, similar joke he tells is so vile, I won’t subject anyone to hearing any more about it. When the blue humor relents, the game relies on meta references to genre classics and self-deprecating jabs about its own inability to keep up with them. Save for a character’s clever realization that the lack of voice acting renders a helium tank useless since you wouldn’t be able to hear someone inhale it, the frequent quips about budgetary constraints, reusing assets, and players requesting refunds only serve to highlight flaws that could go unnoticed otherwise.

One area that’s deservedly exempt from in-game criticism is the story, which is split into three parts. Each is separated by narration from a mysterious man in a trenchcoat with intimate knowledge of what transpired at Grandma’s fatal birthday party, just not who killed her – that’s for you to find out, and you will before the credits roll as the story reveals all while you finish the final puzzles. No question is left unanswered, and even things you didn’t think to question turn out to have answers, too. Every ah-ha moment only made me more invested in the unhinged family narrative. Though each reveal and red herring is wilder than the last, together they form an impressive, tightly plotted mystery with twists that – wacky as some are – still manage to feel grounded. When I replayed the game, I also realized that clues about the dramatic climax, which recontextualizes the entire adventure, are on brazen display from the beginning, cleverly camouflaged within the mean-spirited sarcasm that seems to come naturally to the whole family.  

Final Verdict

Who the Fuck Ate Grandma? is a narrative feast for any comedy-horror fan, with a disturbed but silly story that carefully hints at its unexpected ending from the beginning. With mostly uncomplicated puzzles throughout, and in-game help available for solving them all, one of the biggest challenges lies in reading the abundance of wordy, awkwardly translated dialogue; none of it voiced, some of it extremely raunchy. A lack of interactivity during important moments, as well as jokes about the game’s budget-related shortcomings point to the solo dev’s lack of resources, but the short journey to discovering who, in fact, ate Grandma is so entertaining, most of the small stuff doesn’t matter. When you’re trying to determine who cannibalized a 93-year-old woman, it puts a lot of things into perspective…

Lizzie played her own copy of Who the Fuck Ate Grandma? on PC.

• Advertisement
• Help support AGH by advertising with us