From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, a game that. wait a minute, are you eating? Yeah. You might w
From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, a game that… wait a minute, are you eating? Yeah. 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 in that any more, thanks to Daedalic releasing an adventure called Journey of a Roach, but that doesn’t matter. When you think cockroach games, you think Bad Mojo. If you don’t, you’re not aware of it. You will be. Oh, yes. You will be. This is a story of death and decay, of dirt and disgust. And that’s 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 little like a fusion of Willard and Jim Carrey, with a stack of stolen money and a plan to disappear with it, who gets stopped in his tracks when his landlord shows up for the rent. With the kind of acting that’s usually reserved for eggplants, Willey finally realises this isn’t actually a problem and he can, y’know, pay the man to piss off. Unfortunately, before he can run away into the night, he decides to pick up his mother’s old locket and is randomly transformed into a cockroach. So, yeah. Definitely a stroke of bad luck there. But these things happen more often than you’d think. (Sometimes with really catchy music (opens in new tab).)
The resulting game, which isn’t super long, is a truly revolting journey through one of the most disgusting worlds this side of Silent Hill, through the crumbling tenement home/dive bar of the King of Filth himself. As a cockroach, you stand as proof all that stuff about surviving nuclear explosions and the end of the world is so much nonsense, with even the slightest blob of glue or paint or… other sticky substances… acting as almost instant death unless you can wiggle your carapace off them in a couple of seconds. And that’s just the start of it. The other roaches in the house are friendly enough, but the rest of the animal kingdom? You can’t even trust the dead ones to lie back and just let you scuttle past in peace.
It’s still JUST alive enough to eat you as you go past. What a pest.
And so you see why this game can be so icky. That’s not a well-drawn picture of a dead rat. That’s an actual dead rat, scanned in for your stomach-churning pleasure by developers who jokingly complain that the problem with trying to scan in spiders is that they would literally by vaporised by the heat of filming. They ordered cockroaches from a supply company and let them be fruitful and multiply, creating what they called ‘a terrarium of horrors’. The rat, though… the rat really had a bad day.
“It was our original goal not to harm any animals during the production of the game,” begins the story.
