hello! goblet grotto is a game about looking around and going into little crevices and holes with your toad friend, assumedly named swampy. the main goal is to collect as many goblets as you can without dying tragically, but it's always the adventure that counts the most...! 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 the game was originally made in 2012, but suddenly 10 years later TC published a remake of the game on his itch.io!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 or giving them some sort of unkillable creature to chase them. there's also a mushroom that sprays you with spores at some point, which makes all the text on the right side of the screen become absolute nonsense. this lasts for an indefinete amount of time, most likely for the rest of the game. so, if you're about to enter a new area, be sure to save.
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 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". goblet grotto's god loves to use ;^0 i think thats cute).
speaking of praying, 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, god being spawned on the block being surrounded.
as far as im aware, god 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!
while playing GG, 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 the comment section of vinny's GG video, so i'm not 100% sure if this is actually true, but whenever the glyphs start mentioning dario it 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 and then enter a new area.
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
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. 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! her instagram and twitter are both under winterofamerica, she doesn't actively post on social media much anymore but many of the webcomics she's made can be found there!
- throughout the entire game, god 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 god/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.