hello! goblet grotto is a game about looking around and going into little crevices and holes with your toad friend. your toad isn't ever given an official name, but because the "status" of your toad reads "lawful - swampy", i'll be calling them swampy! the main goal is to collect as many goblets as you can without dying tragically, but other than that, it's a game with no real or true purpose other than to experience the world at large and also to be very very scared by it. gobby gorto itself was made by thecatamites, who has made various other games such as 10 beautiful postcards, magic wand, and space funeral (his most popular gamei think!). the game was originally made in 2012, but suddenly 10 years later TC published a remake of the game on his itch.io!
not to get personal but goblet grotto has been one of my favorite games, ever. theres basically an endless amount of content for it and the art, writing, and lore is so charming to me. only bad thing about it (besides the gameplay of course) is how underground and unknown it is, barely anything about the game has been documented. SO, i took it upon myself to create an archive of all of the goblet information i'm aware of, half because i love talking about this game so much and other half because its so easy to get lost in it because of how giant and detailed it is. hope u have fun learning about video game :o)
save often. as much as i love this game, it does not love the player back at ALL and is ready to fuck them over at any given time. this most often ends in the game softlocking the player, giving them some sort of unkillable creature to chase them, or just deciding to throw something at them that ranges from being mildly inconvient/annoying to heavily affecting the gameplay for the rest of the game. even still, saving isn't always a reliable option. sometimes the game will decide, "yknow what, ill just corrupt your file instead" and you have to start all over. so, when you get into the game, be fully prepared and ready for the gameplay to just hate you and be very, very clear with how much it hates you.
whenever swampy collapses, be sure to do one of the three: pray, collect goblets, or eat meat. sometimes, the glyphs on the top of the screen tell you when swampy needs to eat (which we'll go into more detail later!) for whenever swampy isnt hungry, collecting more goblets or praying will help. if there arent any goblets around you right now, praying will still help and maybe even give you some meat and goblets! be careful though! though praying can help you, if you've done it several times it will eventually start destroying your game and swampy's mental health. Stone Cows will appear, high-pitched buzzing triangles will be with you for the rest of the game, the glyphs will reflect swampy's declining mental health and start appearing ones that arent even in the guide book (mentioned more later), and the side text (narrated by GG's god, gobbo) will become corrupted with every action you do (eating can lead to it saying "Taste of tin desire More chewing", "hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger hunger", "eatbones drinkblood eatmore"; sleeping can become "scream uncontrollably atGOBLET does not help GETGOBLETS FUCKER!!!", "UP AND ATEMCOWBOY!!!!!! WORLD IS HYOU OYSTER ;^)", "fallingGOBLET GOBLETSfalling falling GHOBLETSscreaming falling falling"; and praying turns to "You have broken the Goblet Grotto Users License! Please hold as stipulated while we replace all files in your computer with lists of Swears.", "NOMORE FOOLING AROUND COLLECTR GOBELTS COWGRRL ;^0", "DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT". gobbo loves to use ;^0 i think thats cute).
there's also, boy how could i even forget these guys, The Paragraphs. i'm not going to get into them right now because thats a LOOOOT of writing and im not even sure how to introduce them. essentially, in the manual that comes with your goblet grotto download, there's a list of paragraphs. at some points during the game it will ask you to visit some of these paragraphs and read them to get a better(?) understanding of your environment. some paragraphs lead into whole situations and scenarios that turn into swampy's death, though in-game it doesn't affect you at all. the paragraphs don't affect the gameplay at all and can be read just for fun, but i do encourage reading them at some point! it adds to the unusual experience of the whole game, besides some of them are funny as hell!
ALSO since i mentioned praying earlier, in seemingly each area there are altars!
in these altars you, of course, pray. these are fairly useful though especially if you need goblets, since if you pray here youre given up to 3 goblets and, according to the game, gobbo being spawned on the block being surrounded.
as far as im aware, gobbo doesnt hurt swampy in any way. all it does is kinda stand around and hang out, which is fine by me. ill occasionally say where the altars are in each area! they aren't exactly important, but goblet grotto hardly ever has reoccuring gameplay elements so i think it's interesting!
while playing goblet grotto, swampy will be honking their thoughts at you through glyphs popping up at the top of the screen. most players think they seem pretty incomprehensible and useless, and theyre partially right. most of the glyphs consist of stuff that, as far as ive seen, arent an actual gameplay mechanic (such as "i am searching for boots of achilles", "haunted lake", "treated by false doctor", etc.) BUT, there are some exceptions! the glyphs can be very useful to know when swampy is dying and how to help them, for example if they start crawling and you see the glyphs "i have starved to death", "death death death death death death", "i'm hungry", "i'm starving", etc, you know that you should feed swampy. the glyphs that include "dario" are useful too, i think! i got this information from @pillgrimm in the comment section of vinesauce vinny's GG video, so i'm not 100% sure if this is actually true, but whenever the glyphs start mentioning dario it apparently means that your file has been corrupted. definetely very ominous.
also, very sorry "got boots of achilles" isn't working! again though, boots of achilles most likely aren't a real thing in the game so dont worry you arent missing important gameplay!!!
there are also, The Secret Glyphs
the first 23 glyphs are normal simple words swampy will say anywhere throughout the game, what makes them secret is that they don't appear in the glyph dictionary and you'll have to look into the files of the game to find out what they mean. as for the complex sentences, they cannot be found anywhere and i had to ask thecatamites what they mean, "The frog face besides two glyphs means something like "(exclaiming)"...". these glyphs only appear once you've made swampy pray several times, to the point where their mental health declines.
one little site i enjoy is frog fortune! its just a silly little site that randomly generates some glyphs.
each seperate area you can find in goblet grotto, most names were taken from the "select level" screen from the secrets menu
sorry for the misleading caption here but no phsyical grotto stuff is uploaded here yet! BUT i DO have physical stuff of it now and hopefully will be able to upload it, just the pngs are too large for the site and ill have to upgrade to supporter to be able to upload them, so at this moment i wont be able to show them :o( soon though!!! soon!!!!! ALSO should note that it's the cracked illegal bootleg crime release of the game, so i sadly cant include the plastic helicopter or other assets of the official goblet cd-rom. thecatamites has allowed the Illegal Bootleg version to be uploaded for all to see though, so dont worry!
ONE MINUTE LATER UPDATE: okay i didnt know that its 5 bucks per month which is, thats a reasonable price and i dont know what else i was expecting, but i dont have a job or a regular source of income + only rely on commissions for money so 5 bucks per month is like a million dollars to me. so my current plan is that ill upload it all to tumblr and then link it here, sorry that i wont be able to add the images directly to here!!! offtopic i saw neocities accepts bitcoin and i think thats silly
THREE HOURS LATER UPDATE: UPLOADED ALL THE PHYSICAL STUFF!!! you can find all of it on my tumblr here!!!!!
just a whole bunch of stuff that were too special to put in a category/stuff i wanted to point out! will add more fun facts overtime, if you want me to add anything to this section LMK
- the meat maze, special, and the title screen of goblet grotto are the exact same map, or at least very similar. another interesting thing i touched on in dario's cement factory is that it mostly uses the same meat texture from these locations. what interests me is the usage of dario's name, especially since dario's cement factory houses many cops, along with how dario appears in the glyphs once your file apparently is corrupted, so it kind of cements dario as a being/sign of corruption. im not sure if this is important to the story or if this is supposed to mean anything but it's very interesting to me, especially since goblet grotto doesnt often have repeating themes
- thecatamites is still actively making video games, just under a different title, which is now garmentdistrict on gamejolt! his current games are adorable and unbelievably charming, i really recommend them.
- by pressing L on the starting screen, it will bring you to "secrets mode" as thecatamites calls it! here you can disable the noises the glyphs make, make swampy immortal, and choose one of the several levels to start in.
- the guy that made all the music for goblet grotto is tommy tone/badtothetone/trashtonix/new vaders! he also made the music for several other games by garmentdistrict/thecatamites such as ten beautiful postcards, magic wand, and the "of the killer" series. here's his bandcamp and twitter :o)
- and the person who made the majority of the art is winter k! their instagram (update, link dont work any more!) and twitter are both under winterofamerica, they also recently (as of april 2024) joined the studio hotbrain!
- throughout the entire game, gobbo is implied to be speaking to swampy/narrating the game through the descriptions on the right of the screen. this is proven once you pray enough and the side text becomes all jumbled and starts using little smileys, and once you enter the special area you're able to find gobbo/the figure that the hooded people by the altars surround, and they talk in a very similar way and also happen to use little smileys.