Bad Mojo

Bad Mojo may be nineteen years old, but in terms of gaming, it’s a one-of-a-kind; a freakish, absurd, Kafkaesque, high-concept rough diamond of a PC adventure. The story, which is set up for you through a gloriously weird and hammily overacted FMV cutscene, is thus: you are Roger Samms (a play on Metamorphosis’s Gregor Samsa), a gobby young bloke who is moments away from running away with a suitcase of ill-gotten cash and leaving his shitty, run-down flat for good, when his soul is inexplicably transmogrified with one of the many cockroaches which infest his dilapidated building. When I first played it, I wasn’t quite sure what'd happened as I explored my new cockroach-sized world, but gradually it becomes clear that the entire game is set around your now-massive flat, and a few adjacent rooms, in search of a way back to your original body.

In the process, a story is told. The game makes heavy employment of those now-nostalgic live-action cutscenes in a number of ways, mainly in telling you what’s going on at human height, but also in flashbacks of the characters' backstories, and particularly in the assistance of a mystical oracle, who appears in the form of other thumb-sized floor-dwellers to aid you in your quest. But the game also makes good use of my favourite gaming-specific narrative technique – that of environmental storytelling. By scuttling along through bins and gutters and the nasty, hidden bits of you and your landlord’s home, little details come together to paint a fascinating and grim portrait of the few characters that populate the game. The game’s art design, and its ingenious puzzles that rely mostly on nudging things with your little insect snout rather than the traditional point-and-click mechanic, are unlike anything else I’ve ever played. Sometimes they can be a little finicky, but what adventure game isn’t? Mostly I love the world that this game presents – the environment of the disgusting apartment, with cig butts and vicious rats and spilt chemicals all over the place, is engaging and oddly charming, in a hideous sort of way.

I love the environment in this game mostly because of its originality – sure, there are a million stories where people get shrunk down and have to navigate a world where everything is now astonishingly gigantic, but there was a lot less booze and porn in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. As I said before, the entire game takes place in maybe a couple of rooms, but from this new perspective, the moulded food and the ashtrays and the monolithic furniture are all creatively put to good to use to make an engaging world full of puzzles and pitfalls, with the bodies of your dead kin indicating where you perhaps shouldn’t tread. One memorable sequence includes roaching across a sleeping character’s face, and others involve disposing of the deadly ‘rat king’ and avoiding the landlord’s now-behemothic cat. All of this is tied together with an ominous, Lynchian soundtrack by Xorcist that makes for a fitting background to the game’s gritty and dingy aesthetic, as well as adding to the game’s off-kilter and joyously weird vibe.

It’s also surprisingly well-written, or at least shows a level of interest in its story, character development, and eye for detail that countless games in our spoilt-rotten present day couldn’t hold a candle to. It’s also unafraid to mix its grimy sense of realism with straight-up magical elements and a revelry in its own ridiculousness, as with the oracle’s many cryptic clues delivered in knowingly audacious rhymes. It’s not a very long game, depending on how quickly you can figure it out, and of course it shouldn’t be, but it’s nonetheless packed with so much thought and artistry that it’s worth replaying just to immerse yourself in its bonkers little universe once again – that and the fact that it has four separate endings. But most of all, I adore just how 1990s it is. The ‘edgy’ vibe, the crazy semi-CG full motion video, the dark synthesiser soundtrack, the datedness of it all; to me, it’s beautiful, and even today it remains a breath of fresh air in one of the most derivative industries imaginable, even if that fresh air is tinged with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and rotten meat.

WATCH THE AMAZING INTRO CUTSCENE HERE