From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling dice to bring random games back to light. This week a game that… wait a minute, are you eating? Yes. You might want to put it down for a while. Just a thought. And animal lovers? push it far away
Bad Mojo is the cockroach game. It’s actually not unique anymore, thanks to Daedalic releasing an adventure called Journey of a Roach, but that doesn’t matter. When you think of cockroach games, you think of Bad Mojo. If you don’t do this, you are not aware of it. You will be. Oh yeah. You will be. This is a tale of death and decay, of filth and disgust. And those are just the behind-the-scenes anecdotes.
The story is one you’ve probably heard a million times. You’re a charming young man who looks a bit like a cross between Willard and Jim Carrey with a stack of stolen money and a plan to get away with it, only to be stopped in your tracks when your landlord shows up about rent. With the kind of acting usually reserved for eggplant, Willey finally realizes that’s not really a problem, and he can, you know, pay the man to get upset. Unfortunately, before he can run away into the night, he decides to pick up his mother’s old locket and is accidentally turned into a cockroach. So yes. There’s definitely bad luck there. But these things happen more often than you think. (Sometimes with really catchy music (opens in new tab).)
The resulting game, which isn’t very long, is a truly disgusting journey through one of the most disgusting worlds this side of Silent Hill, through the crumbling tenement/saloon of the King of Filth himself. As a cockroach, you’re proof that all that stuff about surviving nuclear explosions and the end of the world is so much nonsense that even the tiniest dab of glue or paint or… other sticky substances… acts as almost instant death unless you can shake your tank off of them in a few seconds. And that is just the beginning. The other roaches in the house are friendly enough, but the rest of the animal kingdom? You can’t even trust the dead to sit back and just let you slip by in peace.
And so you see why this game can be so gross. That’s not a well drawn picture of a dead rat. This is an actual dead rat, scanned for your stomach-churning enjoyment by developers who jokingly complain that the problem with trying to scan spiders is that the heat of filming literally vaporizes them. They ordered cockroaches from a supply company and allowed them to fertilize and reproduce, creating what they called a “terrarium of terror.” But the rat… the rat Yes, really had a bad day.
“Our original goal in making the game was not to harm animals,” the story begins. It doesn’t get much better from there as our friend there was just captured by an exterminator from a restaurant… who then smashed him into his truck. Apparently not overly concerned, the team ran back to tape it to the scanner table and snap as many shots as possible before it started to stink and rot, and the story became, “We only harmed animals that were in the wild anyway.” were on death row.”
At least the cats in the FMV bits were treated by a proper trainer.
The catFish can you find it in the kitchen? Decapitated in the studio. Being photographed.
Here’s the happy Making Of video that goes into great detail. Bad Mojo is easily the game with the most kills in the real world, at least until the Tomb Raider team decided that Lara’s death didn’t look accurate enough.
(How did they sleep at night? Answer: By switching to decaf coffee.)
In the game itself, you are also responsible for some deaths. Although at least simulated. One of the earliest enemies is a spider, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since spiders are inherently evil.
It’s not usually a match in favor of a roach, but this time that roach has a human brain on hand… plus the spider is conveniently right next to a lit cigarette. After pushing it in the jump direction, there’s a rapid rush of fire and the forces of good and justice can take down a monster with only about nine hundred and forty trillion, including the one that just fell in your hair.
Not bloody enough? Rats also turn out to be anything but friendly to a scurrying horror like you, and this time there’s no convenient cigarette butt. But there is a solution. Climb over the rat through a hole in a bathroom mirror. look down See a large bundle of razor blades conveniently glued together. Do it Rain.
So, all very happy things then. On the plus side, I suppose that attention to detail isn’t limited to things that can be killed. Bad Mojo is a fairly simple game for the most part, your only real skills being pushing things and crawling over things – the precise crawling sometimes goes so far as to offer huge swathes of pointless scenes, otherwise leave you searching after crawling around like mad, one thing to keep going. There’s no map, only a few places to get an overview of the current area, and it’s really easy to get lost or lose track of what you’re doing despite knowing exactly where you are.
Whether you matter somewhere or not, it absolutely is wasteful the world with her dark love, with very few shortcuts to create the illusion of a real place full of horrors. If you crawl around your landlord’s bed, for example, you’ll see that it’s more than just the stained mattress it appears to be upstairs. It’s a stained mattress with a hiding place.
Meanwhile, the table in his restaurant kitchen will likely make you never want to eat again.
As you explore, something of a storyline also begins to unfold from the scenery and occasional cutscenes – much like Gone Home, with more coprophagy. Eddie the Landlord is on the brink of death because, despite his well-deserved resistance to all diseases as a side benefit of renting out his rooms to most of them, his sloppiness has led to stupid things like leaving the gas on.
Without the timely intervention of our hero, everything will boom. And indeed, our hero does not to have to intervene, retrieving his body just in time to make it before the explosion and laughing himself to death. It doesn’t work out too well as he’s also carrying a large bag of stolen money and his “cockroach” alibi only buys him a straitjacket when the police arrest him on an apparent murder count.
At least he gets a few minutes of pleasure in someone else’s suffering, and isn’t that ultimately what we’re all looking for? Some would say yes. It is not advisable to lend a knife to these people.
what is Yes, really However, the point is that our hero and Eddie have more in common than they think. Eddie is Willey’s father, and thus, by process of elimination, Willey is Eddie’s son. Willey’s mother could have written a note to that effect, or she could have chosen to leave a short note somewhere in the slime, or one of a hundred other plans. Instead, she opted for the “turn a scruffy son into a cockroach and hope it all works out” approach to family reunification, which even Dr. Phil hasn’t tried yet.
It only comes to something when the building explodes and he is holding the magic amulet and Eddie has a picture of her wearing it. Together they escape to an incredibly cheap set pretending to be New Mexico to study roaches and run a bar.
But really, the plot of this one isn’t the point. Just weigh both sides. The reunion between father and son. The game where you crawl over a real dead rat as a cockroach and have a billion more disgusting scenes ahead of you.
It’s no wonder people remembered it whether they played it or not, leading to a re-release as Bad Mojo Redux (opens in new tab). The game runs well, although the movies on my computer are so choppy that they can no longer be viewed. Hooray for YouTube.
No animals were killed in the making of this crapshoot. However, this cat has been petted a few times and seemed to appreciate it.
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