Ghoul School (NES) Playthrough
274A playthrough of Electro Brain's 1992 action-adventure game for the NES, Ghoul School.
A few days before Halloween 1991, Spike O'Hara picked up a glowing skull that he found in a graveyard on his way home from school. He brought it to class the following day to show his science teacher, but much to everyone's dismay, the still glowing skull summoned its undead friends. The school is now overrun with monsters, the girl Spike wanted to ask to the Halloween Dance has gone missing, and since Spike was the cause of it all, he should probably do something to save the school and the object of his unwholesomely moist affection.
Ghoul School is a simple take on the Metroidvania-style platformers of the NES era. Spike has free roam of the halls of Ghoul School, but starting out armed with just a baseball bat, he'll need to find and arm himself with a wide array of gizmos and doodads to overcome progress-gating baddies and obstacles. The place is massive - there are over 100 rooms to explore if you're being thorough - so until you've figured out a viable path through the game, most of your time will be spent aimlessly wandering the halls, snapping towels at giant eyeballs and combing classrooms for health items.
The game is full of great ideas, and a monster-filled high school is an ideal setting for a goofy Halloween-themed action game, but Ghoul School never really gels. The sprites are large and nicely detailed, but there are only a handful of enemies, and the endless stretches of palette swapped hallways make for a dull looking game that's difficult to navigate without drawing maps. The controls are responsive but annoyingly stiff, and though extra health can be found everywhere, it's not super fun to play a game that forces you to eat unavoidable hits.
Ghoul School is entirely playable, but like many of Imagineering's NES platformers, it's an aggressively mediocre game that never capitalizes on its potential, and it's boring. The ending is pretty funny, though, and I liked playing as a guy who looks like O.D. from TerrorVision.
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