The idea of placing obstacles everywhere in order to make the player learn by “trying everything” hasn’t aged that good. Maybe sometimes “weird for the sake of weirdness” is not always the way to go in designing games. Well, it’s not, but it does manage to be cryptic a lot and since there is no inventory nor health to speak of, dying over and over again is par for the course. In the featurette, highly recommended viewing, the designers say they were afraid that most people wouldn’t get the hints in the various videos and find the game esoteric and unplayable. Maybe they should have just designed the game to be approached differently, but I can see the dilemma the developing team was facing. Naturally, Bad Mojo is not even that realistic, it’s just designed in a way to make you think and act like a cockroach with a human mind. The iperrealistic simulation is fun only for a niche kind of market, not the one really interested in weaving a narrative like the game from Pulse Interactive.
Personally, I find it ideal when games find a middle point: a realistic gameplay experience that also managed to be entertaining. Realism vs Gameplay: the neverending struggleĪnd here we come to the old “realism vs gameplay” tirade. I have no quarrel with the adventure part, but the action? Under that shiny resistant beetle shell that acts as a sort of bait for adventure gamers, there’s an action adventure game lying in wait. Unfortunately for the gameplay, that’s its main issue, there’s not much else a cockroach can actually do. You move objects around, balance yourself on leg tables in order to climb around and not much else. None of that is in Bad Mojo, the player is not asked to do anything that an insect wouldn’t be capable of doing. This is because the child can do things no normal human infant could do without hurting himself, like falling from great heights, jumping hurdles and throwing heavy things around.
The game is supposed to be scary cause you’re a defenseless child, but it doesn’t work, at all. These last few days I’ve been playing Among The Sleep, a modern horror game where you play as an infant child going around solving puzzles.
Which is something I’ve always disliked about those “immersive” experiences: either the game is designed around the strengths and limitations of the protagonist or else it can’t be considered immersive. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a wonderful design choice that the game was conceived and developed with a cockroach in mind.
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