Out of curiosity, and cuz he’s still one of characters that hasn’t been added, I decided to study and figure out the art style. I know this may not be a 100% accurate match, but this is about as close as I could get.
Made in Inkscape, and this idea actually became a big reason for me to get into the editor in the first place.
GreyPark was an indie game available through Gamejolt from December 2014 and, presumably, remained available until the turn of the 2020s. Its dev is Jeremy Bécété, known under usernames NayTeeGames, TheNayer25, KreyTian, Mendarx, Beceith, ceith and Old Bct. Moreover, the latter three relate more to his composer nature. He is currently involved in music and sound design.
It was a small indie game from declining era of pickup collector formula, to which virtually every slender clone belonged. Gameplay was built around learning map, collecting knick-knacks, and encountering a pursuer who wanted only one thing from you: to send you straight to a game over scene without delay. GP was the last project of this genre by this creator and, unsurprisingly, the last one to be released. Squidward Slendypants and Simpson.exe, released in August 2014, followed a broadly similar development pattern.
Despite the considerable amount of metadata, every known build remains inaccessible. On July 6, 2024, the game page (excluding file archives) was restored at Nayt's request, despite his account being banned. On July 30 of the following year, the page once again displayed "You found a secret! But on further inspection, you realize it's just an empty page."
Around three builds are known from snapshots: 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Looking closely at one of playthroughs also revealed a readme.txt file containing the line "Last: 1.5 (?)". This is the only known evidence of version 1.5, which was cancelled for an unknown reason. During the search, attempts were made to contact both dev and those very yt gamers. First one confirmed that he hadn't saved anything. Last ones also reported losing their backups after reinstall of OS, replacing their PCs, or simply losing their drives.
Plot takes place after the massacre in fictional park "PrettyPark," referred to as "Great Murder." A witness named John Wald calls a police officer asking for help. A moment later, after being asked to provide his location, the caller suddenly falls silent, leaving only fragmented information for the investigation. The officer shouts into the phone in an attempt to establish contact, but receives a phrase in a low voice that would become title name - Grey Park.
Scene changes. An escort appears in front of the player. He tells us that since we are alone, our task is to collect forgotten belongings left behind after investigation. Escort mentions a recently recorded murder. He wishes us luck on the mission, tells us he will bring a crew the next day, and bids us good night. Model itself is noteworthy. Standing before us is none other than Owen Lykins, a character from the Xbox game series State of Decay, specifically its "Breakdown" DLC.
The evening environment and the entire park are rather chaotic. According to dev, the location was built from scratch while taking inspiration from Emergency DS. As soon as we cross the threshold onto the path, an invisible trigger collider initiates a transition to the loading scene. A black skybox, a reversed bell, and the message "Loading, please wait... Welcome to the "GreyPark."" immediately tell the players that they are about to encounter something unsettling.
It is nighttime in the courtyard. Behind the protagonist, the path through which he entered is blocked by a wooden fence. The entire ground surface is white despite the grass bunches. The trees, seemingly selected at random with the terrain brush, have different-colored bark. BigTree from Standard Assets stands out from the rest: it has dark brown bark, whereas the others feature various bark colors and trunk shapes.
Ambience theme comes from the Freesound. Its source is a processed recording of Sluis Engelen 3, a dutch ship lock, recorded by klankbeeld on March 21, 2013. Objects that must be collected are quite literally things lying around in our path: knife near spinning teacups, hat near bonfire, fresh and rotten hearts near trade tent, clean femur bone near drinking machines, "severed" heads in the middle of the walkways, printouts with a thick cross drawn over a sunny park and the game's title, as well as "I SEE YOU," written in bloody white text on a black background.
At the same time, game immediately conveys the impression of a cheap production through clean but awkwardly positioned corpses with knives stuck into them, despite having no visible wounds apart from pools of blood. Apparently just another terrain texture. A genuine sense of unease can come from an invisible person lying near one of the houses. In other words, the clothed object retains the properties of a human body despite the actual person being physically absent. After wandering around the area for some time, the player can find the escort's bleeding corpse near a tree. It's that guy who delivered the monologue a few scenes earlier. As an object, his entire body can be picked up.
Enemy is a huge, player-sized or even larger, tricolored skull emitting a white glow. Everything except the teeth and lower jaw is black. Teeth are yellow and the jaw is red. However, this palette has no hidden meaning and is simply the result of an alt solution. Nayt did not know about UV mapping, so he directly created several solid-color materials in Unity Editor and assigned them to the appropriate areas of the model.
The sound it emits is a loop taken from Ghoul's Forest 3, a mod for Doom 2. Specifically, the audio sjasact.wav from wad file was assigned to an Audio Source component with a modified Spatial Blend coroutine and Linear Rolloff enabled. As a result, the sound grows louder. When the player turns or changes position, the sound also shifts in pitch, seemingly due to the 3D Spatial Blend. From the start, the skull remains beneath the terrain with a dynamic collider and always knows the player's location. As a result, it simply emerges from underground as though nothing unusual were happening.
When the player's and skull's trigger colliders come into contact, provided player is not standing still while skull circles them, scene is send to the defeat scene. Eerie skybox is a muddy blue. In addition to villian, whose eye sockets emits flames, scene contains text and return button, accompanied by a jumpscare sound and the repeated phrase from the phone-call scene, spoken in a low voice: "Grey Park".
Origin of the jumpscare is unknown. Nayt confirmed this, joking that "it's been 10 years." However, the same effect had previously been used in another portfolio example, "Katie.wmv", specifically during a jumpscare involving HIM from The Powerpuff Girls, which was the subject of that undergame.
Defeat segment was included in every playthroughs, as nobody managed to collect all objects. Players did not know how many they were supposed to collect, nor did they realize that some environmental objects were collectible because of their specific interaction angles. Another factor was that the skull soared at the same speed as the player. If the player hesitated, the enemy would catch up, but it would not accelerate and without a sprint.
Nayt only remembers the victory scene fragmentarily. According to him, the skull was absent. There was a "YOU WON" message and a return button.
The reception and player response were rather dry. GP did not become a hit. As of June 2015, it had only four ratings with an average score of 2.8 out of 5, 13 followers, and 196 downloads. At the same time, two players posted links to their playthroughs on the game's page, while Nayt replied to them and even recommended that they try the then-current version 1.4. Thus, the page was not merely a distribution point. It also served as a small point of feedback between the dev and testers.
However, based on the playthroughs, the following conclusion can be drawn: the game was less a good indie title than an irritating and UX-unstable one. If some players managed to collect as many as eight items, this only led to further confusion about what they were supposed to do next. Should they return to the starting point, where they had arrived, or simply accept defeat?
According to the players themselves, the main villian was not simply scary. Its repetitive loop sound was annoying, making the chase more frustrating than tense. As the cherry on top, the WASD controls did not work correctly. W and A did not perform the commands for moving forward or left. As a result, one lad of them even opened the configuration menu in unity launcher and went into the Input settings.
Nayt apparently tried to address this by adding a Shift+Alt shortcut to switch from WASD to ZQSD, although this was not really a programming solution so much as an exploitative workaround: "shift+alt for set controls WASD (it's in ZQSD) [modify on principal menu unity inputs]". In other words, the player was directly instructed to change the keys manually.
Nevertheless, Nayt announced a sequel in February 2015. This is indicated by a snapshot of dev's page from May. The project had the subtitle "The 3 Nights." Apart from the metadata visible in the snapshot, almost nothing was known about the sequel because its page had never been preserved.
Nayt himself no longer remembered it at the time of the mention, expressing surprise and noting that this was the first time he had heard about some of his unreleased projects, such as ENSURE.
GP had apparently been an experiment aimed at gaining some popularity. It was not simply a carefully planned horror game, but a project intended to obtain at least some response. However, distribution remained limited to a single site. According to Nayt, it never spread elsewhere, as nothing related to the game was found on his Mediafire account.
No later than January 2019, Alexa Koenig stated that Nayt's page and games had been removed from GameJolt.
Search began no earlier than August 2021. On the 19th, Nayt contacted WolfBlind Wolfie to ask whether he still had the build featured in his playthrough. He also told him that he no longer had either the project or any builds due to changing computers and having his GameJolt account banned, and said he would be grateful for a positive response.
However, Wolfie's response came a year later, through an acquaintance who also knew Nayt. He stated that he had lost his backups because of a drive failure, and the sought-after game was among the files affected. He wished luck with the search.
Over the following years, between 2022 and 2024, Nayt attempted to recover GP through GameJolt, which did not produce a favorable result for a long time. Nikar (a.k.a. PlayPo), the aforementioned friend who received Wolfie's response, was also working on a fan remake, posting teasers on NayTeeGames' Lair Discord server. In August 2023, he stated that searching for menu theme is truly insane.
In August 2024, I, Kosolapsky, learned that the game existed. That same month, I contacted two players about whether they still had their files: Crustyoldman and Freeware Games. Neither had made backups of the games featured in each video on their former channels.
From September 2024 to January 2026, I found several models, as well as deductions and hypotheses regarding the game's technical side. For example, a TextMesh click script transition to another scene, judging by the dev's intentions, habits, and logic, was likely used more frequently in less "passive" scenes, particularly menu.
The control issue is hypothesized to have been caused not so much by the region, development environment, or an engine bugs, but by a conflict between Advanced Terrain Shaders v2 asset and Unity's built-in terrain system. Specific shaders and scripts appear to have been the source of the problem. They were responsible for making the grass in Squidward Slendypants more saturated and almost contrasty, and may very well have also been responsible for the conflict with the onput Manager.
Most of the sources for the stock models originate from Free3d. Their actual use in GreyPark is unconfirmed, but identical and related meshes were also found on Cadnav and Archibase Planet. However, Nayt did not disclose every asset provider directly, and some of those sources may no longer be preserved by search engines. At present, around 22 3D models and their sources have been identified, with Free3d being one of the most common.
For example, Owen Lykins, having been exported from CryEngine 3 — the engine on which the first State of Decay was based — and appearing in RenderWare for some examples in the GTA series, has an unknown distribution history, and it is unclear where Nayt obtained the model. The earliest source for Owen dates to January 2015, which does not fit the timeline.
Another notable discovery is the origin of the menu background. It is a monochrome photo of a park at night called "Night", taken by Polish photographer Mariusz Jankowski. Photo is known to have existed at least since February 2008.
Unfortunately, GreyPark was barely remembered as an outstanding project during its public availability, unlike Nayt's more prominent Ben.exe series. However, that does not automatically make the search meaningless.
Because it was built around the Unity 4 pipeline, GP provides an opportunity to study a specific layer of development from that era: its assets, technical solutions, errors, game structure, and methods of distribution.
When I first discovered the game, its significance to me was primarily as a bundle for reverse engineering, one that could potentially allow for the restoration of traces of its development and an approximation of its original code through decompile.
In other words, it would give me freedom to experiment creatively, even to expand its cross-platform compatibility from PC to consoles, particularly older platforms that were contemporary with this example.
GP is merely a drop in the ocean. An ocean in which creators once swam, driven by the desire to distinguish themselves through their own innovations, regardless of how much time and effort the process required.
Trivia: https://imgur.com/a/ROokjFU
P.S. I completely forgot to mention that the shared flying skull trope originates not only from Ghost's Forest 3 but also from Hylophobia by Willong, with the latter supposedly being the primary source.
I’ve heard this quite often from various sources.
Include:
What I do know is that the earliest use I'm aware of dates back to at least 2012, possibly earlier. Does anyone recognize source? Any help appreciated.