From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to expose random games. This week a game that… hold on, are you eating? Yes. You may 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 not really unique in that anymore, thanks to the fact that Daedalic released 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, you are not aware of it. You will be. Oh yeah. You will be. This is a story 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 an amalgamation of Willard and Jim Carrey, with a pile of stolen money and a plan to disappear with it, which is thwarted when his landlord shows up for the rent. With the kind of acting usually reserved for eggplants, Willey finally realizes that this isn’t actually a problem and he can, you know, pay the guy to get pissed off. Unfortunately, before he can run off into the night, he decides to retrieve his mother’s old locket and is randomly transformed into a cockroach. So yes. Definitely a stroke of luck there. But these things happen more often than you might think. (Sometimes with really catchy music (opens in new tab).)
The resulting game, which isn’t super long, is a truly repulsive journey through one of the most disgusting worlds this side of Silent Hill, through the crumbling dwelling house/dive bar of the King of Filth himself. As a cockroach, you stand as proof that all this stuff about surviving nuclear explosions and the end of the world is so much nonsense, with even the tiniest blob of glue or paint or… other sticky substances… acting as an almost instant dead unless you can move your shield away from them in a few seconds. And that’s 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 run by in peace.
And so you see why this game can be so icky. That’s not a well-drawn picture of a dead rat. That’s a real dead rat, scanned in for your stomach-churning pleasure by developers jokingly complaining that the problem with scanning spiders is that they would literally evaporate from the heat of filming. They ordered cockroaches from a supply company and allowed them to fertilize and multiply, creating what they called “a terrarium of horrors.” The rat, though… the rat real had a bad day.
“It was our original goal not to harm animals during the production of the game,” the story begins. It doesn’t get much better from there as our friend was just captured from a restaurant there by an exterminator… who then slammed him into his truck. Apparently not much bothered, the team rushed back to tape it to the scanner table and take as many pictures as possible before it started to stink and rot, and the story became, “We only harmed animals on death row anyway. “
At least the cats in the FMV bits were handled by a good trainer.
The catfish can you find it in the kitchen? Beheaded in the studio. To be photographed.
Here’s the cheery Making Of video that goes into that in depth. Bad Mojo is easily the game with the most real-world kills to its credit, 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 coffee without chaff.)
In the game itself you are also responsible for a lot of deaths. Although simulated, at least. One of the first enemies is a spider, which should come as no surprise as spiders are evil by nature.
It’s not normally a match in favor of a cockroach, but this time that cockroach has a human brain on hand… and the spider is conveniently next to a lit cigarette. After pushing it in the direction of its jump, a rapid whooshing fire sounds and the forces of good and justice are able to take down one monster, with about nine hundred and forty trillion to go, including the one that just fell in your hair.
Not bloody enough? Rats also prove less friendly with a sinking horror like you, and there’s no handy cigarette butt this time around. But there is a solution. Climb above the rat, through a whole in a bathroom mirror. Look down. See a big stack of razor blades conveniently stuck together. fix it rain.
So all very happy things then. On the bright side, I think, this attention to detail isn’t limited to things that can be killed. Bad Mojo is a simple enough game for the most part, your only real skills are to push things and run over things – the precise sinking sometimes extends to the point where it offers huge amounts of pointless scenes, otherwise you’ll be left maddening crawling around looking for the one thing you are supposed to keep going. There’s no map, just a few locations where you can see a vista of the current area, and it’s very easy to get lost or lose track of what you’re doing despite knowing exactly where you are.
Whether you’re important or not somewhere, it’s absolute lavishly the world with its dark love, with very few shortcuts to create the illusion of a real place full of horrors. For example, as you stroll around your landlord’s bed, you see that it’s more than just the stained mattress that appears to be on it. It’s a stained mattress with a stock.
Meanwhile, the table in his restaurant kitchen will probably make you never want to eat again.
As you explore, something of a story also begins to unfold from the scenery and occasional cutscenes – a bit like Gone Home, with more coprophagia. Eddie the landlord is about to die, because despite a well-earned resistance to all diseases as a side benefit of renting out his rooms to most of them, his carelessness has led to silly things like leaving the gas on.
Without the timely intervention of our hero, this means that everything goes wrong. And indeed, our hero is not to have to intervene, getting his body back just in time to make it out before the explosion and laughing his ass off. Things don’t work out too well, considering he’s also carrying a large bag of stolen money, and his “roach” alibi only buys him a straitjacket when the police arrest him for what appears to be a clear case of murder.
Still, he gets at least a few minutes of happiness from another’s suffering and isn’t that ultimately what we’re all looking for? Some would say “yes”. It is not advisable to lend these people a knife.
What’s real however, what’s going on is that our hero and Eddie have more in common than they think. Eddie is Willey’s father, and so by elimination, Willey is Eddie’s son. Willey’s mother could have written a note about this, or chosen to leave a quick message somewhere in the slime, or one of a hundred other plans. Instead, she took the “turn dowdy son into cockroach and hope it all works out” approach to family reunion that even Dr. Phil has yet to try.
It doesn’t come to anything until the building explodes, leaving him holding the magical amulet and Eddie a picture of her wearing it. Together they run off to a staggeringly cheap set masquerading as New Mexico, to study cockroaches and run a bar.
But really, the plot of this one isn’t the point. Just weigh the two sides. The reunion between father and son. The game where you, a cockroach, crawl over a real dead rat and have a billion more disgusting scenes to go.
It’s no wonder people remember whether they played it or not, which led to a re-release as Bad Mojo Redux (opens in new tab). The game plays fine, although the movies on my computer are so choppy that they are unwatchable. Hooray for YouTube.
No animals were killed in the making of this Crapshoot. However, this cat did get a few strokes and seemed to appreciate it.
