Average highschooler Keisuke Akahashi’s final class trip goes horribly awry as the bus holding him and all his classmates suffers a horrible crash. Stranded out in the stormy wilderness, he and eleven of his classmates are forced to take shelter inside a creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere. Little do they know that the mansion is actually a nightmarish biological research facility — and their only chance of escape is through killing the master of the household.
Links to this game are scarce, but it has been saved from becoming lost media thanks to the preservation work of Japanese blogger Hagane Ya. The original version can still be downloaded via a 2001 Enterbrain contest page
preserved in the Wayback Machine. As it never received any translations, it is only available in Japanese.
This game contains the following tropes:
- Anti-Grinding: There is no EXP system in this game, so that means every encounter is a drain on the party's resources.
- Anyone Can Die: And how! Aside from Tsutomu, who dies eating the meal that was meant for Keisuke, everyone else in the group (except Eiji) can die if you don't do things correctly. For example:
- Tsutomu dies no matter what, due to him eating the meal meant for Keisuke that was poisoned, causing him to vomit up blood until he dies.
- Irene can die if you forget to patch up her arm when the group makes camp.
- Yuuta can die if you failed to find a spare phone battery; when he calls Keisuke, he'll tell him where's he's going, but if you don't have the spare battery, the call will cut out mid-conversation, and even if you know where Yuuta is being taken to, you'll be too late to save him.
- Tomo can die if you fail to solve the puzzle, falling to her death onto a pit of spikes.
- Takaya will always die unless you keep everyone else alive to the end, as he lets himself burn inside the mansion along with his brother.
- Big Bad: Kouzou Osada is the one responsible for trapping the students in a deadly game to survive as well as experimenting on Takaya and Takashi, his two sons.
- Big Eater: Tsutomu, to the point that he even has emergency snacks, and even offers to eat off of Keisuke's plate when the latter feels like not eating it. It proves to be his downfall, as he dies due to Keisuke's meal being poisoned.
- Creepy Housekeeper: Azumi, the blue-haired maid that welcomes the main cast into the mansion. Keisuke immediately has a bad feeling about her when he first meets her, and said feeling gets justified when it's revealed that she was the one who poisoned Keisuke's meal after Tsutomu dies after eating it. This is only because she was Made Into A Slave by Osada's experiments, as flashbacks reveal she was a kind woman who had no clue what was happening in the mansion at the time.
- Deadly Game: Osada announces his intention to make the students assist him with an “experiment” by turning the situation into a death game with him as the final boss. Either the horrors of his mansion kill all of the students, or the students kill him for the escape key.
- Dead Person Impersonation: In the true ending of the game, a news report informs the player that the student Eiji Kanzaki had committed suicide 2 days before the bus accident, and Minamisawa is the one impersonating him through the use of his flame.
- Dying as Yourself: Azumi throws herself out the window near the end of the game after having the parasite that was controlling her removed, as penance for the actions she did while under it.
- Foreign Exchange Student: Irene is a blonde American, and her poor Japanese is represented through her dialogue, which is formatted in an odd blend of Hiragana and Katakana characters.
- Horror Hunger: Takaya's constant, strangely unquenchable thirst turns out to be a desire for human blood. Because of this, he chooses to burn inside the mansion alongside his brother in any ending that's not the True Ending.
- Japanese Delinquent: Nobuhiko. He has the blonde-dyed hair, a butterfly knife, and flies off the handle when he can’t find the lighter for his smokes.
- Multiple Endings: They mostly depend on whether you're able to keep your fellow classmates alive with you; this is foreshadowed an earlier conversation between Takaya and Keisuke, where Keisuke insists that the best way to approach a zombie video game they both play is by minimizing human casualties.
- Mutants: Many of the scientists in the mansion are mutated in nightmarish ways, with flailing tentacles and missing limbs.
- Ordinary Highschool Student: Arguably all the survivors of the bus crash, but particularly the protagonist, Keisuke.
- Our Ghouls Are Creepier: The game's title is derived from the GU-L Project, one of several projects attempting to create powered superhumans. The GU-L Project's ghouls have red eyes and a taste for human flesh.
- The Quiet One: Eiji Kanzaki, who Keisuke doesn't know much about.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Takaya gains a red eye when he rejoins the party after seemingly being shot and dropped into the basement for dead. His brother has them too.
- Turn-Based Combat: Like many RPG Maker games, this is how GU-L's combat is formatted.
- We Can Not Go On Without You: If Keisuke bites it during battle, it's Game Over.
- Womb Level: The inside of Abadon; he’s essentially a stomach the size of a mini-dungeon, forcing Takaya to fight his way out before he's digested.
