GRAVE CHASE

GAME INFO: Grave Chase is an action-puzzle game partially inspired by Zombies Ate My Neighbors and other horror-themed video games that were released in the early 1990s. Players control one of two young siblings, Bro or Sis, in order to navigate a different cemetery for every day of October, exhuming body parts that were placed in fresh graves by a homocidal groundskeeper who murdered the sibling's parents. The two siblings, with shovels in hand, race around each cemetery digging up those body parts in order to assemble them into an army of animated undead monsters that will end the groundskeeper's murder spree. Players are forced to contend with undead creatures as well as the groundskeeper himself, who will chase the player upon hearing or seeing them. Contact with the groundkeeper results in a grisly death via meat cleaver, spraying pixellated blood that coats the surroundings. Once players collect each body part in the stage, they must reach a warp point that transports them to the next level before the enraged groundskeeper catches them.

SETTING: Like its spiritual predecessor Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Grave Chase appears to take place in a suburban American setting albeit restricted to an expansive, haunted cemetery. Many archetypical b-movie monsters stalk the cemetery, including zombies, skeletons, mummies, giant carnivorous plants, and psychopaths wearing hockey masks among other creatures. As the days progress from the first of October to the thirty-first, each cemetery becomes larger and more densely populated by enemies and exhumable body parts alike, resulting in a surmounting challenges as well as creating more complex undead abominations to combat the groundskeeper at the game's climax.

FUNERARY IMAGERY: The same three upright headstones appear throughout each level, resembling modern gravestones with crosses, spirit faces, skulls, and the suggestion of inscriptions rendered in pseudo 16-bit pixel art. Exhuming each grave reveals a wooden coffin that may contain enemies, body parts, or items that temporarily enhance gameplay. Occasionally, the graves are boarded up with wooden planks or covered with a stone slab, providing an extra barrier that players need to destroy before acquiring the items contained within. Visually, the headstones are subject to atmospheric effects of the game, becoming rain-slicked or covered with moss once players survive for ten days.

ANALYSIS: Grave Chase isolates one of the most familiar aspects of horror video games from the 1980s and 1990s by focusing exclusively on the cemetery as a stage that is sustained throughout the course of an entire game. Even though the headstones do not change significantly as the game progresses, the increasing complexity of the game's level design and regular additions of new enemies keep the gameplay from growing stale despite being limited to the sole environment of a cemetery. Ultimately, Grave Chase's development in the late 2010s effectively reveals the lasting impact made by such horror games upon generations that encountered them before the turn of the millennium. The cemetery, being a locus for all of the events in Grave Chase, becomes codified as an indisputable emblem of horror video games.

Gallery

A fresh grave acts as the title screen


An example map showing a basic layout


Three headstones with opened coffins


Certain graves will contain body parts


Moss appears on gravestones after day ten


Stone graves prove more difficult to pry open


Exhuming stone grave reveals human remains