Bad Mojo
1996
- point-and-click
- puzzle
- adventure
- horror
- drama
- single player
The story
You are Roger Samms. All your life you’ve been the little man, the square peg, the forgotten man. With a rat-hole apartment, dead-end job, and an unbearable landlord breathing down your neck, you’ve finally had enough. Armed with a briefcase of stolen cash and a plane ticket to Mexico, you had the perfect plan. If it wasn’t for an accident involving a mysterious family keepsake, you may have pulled it off. Unfortunately, you’ve unleashed something crazy, something weird, like a twisted spell. Baaad mojo. Finding yourself suddenly transformed into a cockroach, you’ll need to brave spiders, a killer cat and a myriad of other perils if you want to survive this long and perilous detour into the night of your soul.
What it’s like
Grimy, pre-rendered rooms seen from low to the floor, lit in sickly yellows and murky browns, with the grain of a 1990s screen softening every corner. Live-action video cutscenes cut in with actors in a tight, claustrophobic world, and the score and ambient hum stay low and uneasy, like a radiator ticking in an empty flat at night. The vibe is seedy, surreal and darkly comic, with a creeping sense of dread that suits a late evening alone with the lights off. Pacing is deliberate and puzzle-driven: long stretches of poking around cramped spaces, then sudden, startling deaths when a wrong move meets one of the many predators roaming a vast, insect-scale apartment. Intensity is moderate: frequent cartoonish peril and a few abrupt, unsettling moments of violence, with no sustained gore, but a constant threat of being squashed or eaten. Emotionally it is a story of a bitter, overlooked man stripped down to nothing and forced to face what he has become, and the decisions you make along the way shape how it ends. It is for players who enjoy old-school point-and-click puzzles, strange and bleak atmospheres, and the slightly grubby charm of mid-90s multimedia adventures.
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