Ghoullery review

Ghoullery is a make-your-own cartoon monster app where you can create unique creatures of your deepest, darkest, imagination. You got different heads, different arms, and when combined, you can have a vampire zombie medusa with 6 legs! Created by Awkward Ninja (David Rhodes), Ghoullery is available on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for $0.99.

Its Halloween time and ghouls are infecting the AppStore! You, however, are not fighting against them, you are creating them!! Ghoullery allows you to create ghouls through selecting a base skeleton then dragging body parts onto it. Open up a jar of weird blue jelly, pick a body part and align it to the body. There are tons of different possibilities with 8 different bone structures to choose from.

The graphical elements are alright. The variety and more simple art style add its own kind of charm to each face and body. Sometimes, it looks like strangely deformed South Park characters, so interpret that as you will. The relatively large library of body parts push the score for graphics up a bit, but I do wish for a bit more details to give things a creepier look.

There is a unique feature they have where if you finish your monster, you can press this heart button at the bottom of the screen to ‘bring to life’ your creation. What this means is you place your monster on a background with a frame around it. I don’t know, but I was expecting some animations. Maybe the ghoul could have unique poses to do based on their base skeletons? Maybe they would at least blink and move slightly? In general, this was something that disappointed me. Nothing in this game feels alive. The flat graphics, the non-moving ghouls, and non-blinking eyes really suck the life out of the game (no pun intended). I would have really liked my strange head-on-arms monster jump up and down or do a dance! But no, it’s all just still images everywhere.

Halloween apps all run into the problem that their staying power only lasts as long as Halloween does… this is an app that I can’t say will have a lot of staying power, but while it lasts, this is a fun little app, good for kids, and good for people with morbid ideas about how human anatomy should be. I think this has appeal to a lot of people, but hopefully by next Halloween, they will expand on this game more.

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Ghoullery was written by Joseph Ho on October 29th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Art. Page viewed 4359 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.