God I love 90s jank. There’s a tendency for games made in this era to be on the cusp of some genuinely fascinating ideas and go for them with all they’ve got… only for the technology of the time to not quite be enough to fully realize the ambition that went into it. This can result in… rough experiences, yeah, but oftentimes it’s a fun experience looking at them from a game design perspective and figuring out what exactly the developers were going for, even if they don’t quite add up in the end. This… type of experience went away around the mid to late 2000s — as indie games began to take prominence in the marketplace — but from the 90s to before then if you look hard enough you’ll find a full-on trove of games made my smaller studios which did their best to reach for the stars, no matter how limited their tools happened to be. And Bad Mojo — the sole game made by Pulse Entertainment before they moved on to more tech-related ventures — in particular, stands out as a pretty solid example of some of the creativity that came with FMV and adventure games during this time period.

You play as Roger, an entomologist planning on embezzling research money, ditching the city, and running off to Mexico to get bitches. On the night before his escape, however, Roger picks up an amulet which all of a sudden hits him with magic power and transplants his soul into the body of a cockroach. Now trapped in the basement of his apartment building, Roger must navigate his way back to his room, keep away from everything in the house that’s now capable of killing him, and uncovering… a way more complex plot than I was expecting for a game which premise is “you have become Gregor Samsa wdyd?” Like, it’s goofy and maybe a bit overcomplicated (like a lot of games of its ilk), but for a premise that can be a plot all on its own it’s… surprisingly psychological, and surprisingly dedicated to exploring and expositing on its characters. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a masterpiece of narrative, or something I’d specifically recommend the game for, but it’s certainly an interesting facet, and definitely something that helps contribute to this game’s charm.

What I’m most fond of, I think, is how novel the gameplay feels. You, in your roach form, use the arrow keys to navigate the apartment complex, and it… almost feels more like some kind of top-down platformer than an adventure game. You’re given rather large areas in which you’re encouraged to explore, and oftentimes your biggest challenge, more than anything, is to figure out where exactly you need to go, and in turn how you can get there. Your roach legs can get you anywhere so long as you can reach it, and most puzzles revolve around getting past a barrier or figuring out how to progress through a specific zone. I’m also a fan of how you, as a cockroach, interact with the environment. Liquids, such as oil or water, and slippery surfaces are potential death traps if you’re not careful enough with your movement, but should you stop moving, think about the situation, and refrain from panicking, you can often get back to a safe spot and avoid losing one of your lives. Creatures such as rats, cats, and spiders are enemies you have no meaningful defence against, and it’s either a matter of turning something in the environment against them or carefully maneuvering through an area to avoid them. There are also other details that are really cute: how often you can see other cockroaches scurrying to the place you’re coincidentally meant to go, or how often the 3D objects you climb up always seem to be on some sort of axis, meaning you never tend to go in a straight line, often twisting and turning around the shape as you scuttle up the table leg or bedframe. A lot of the focus of the gameplay is about really making you feel like Spider-Man a cockroach, and to that extent… it succeeds, and does kind of feel like nothing else I’ve particularly played.

I’m also really into the way the game blends CG and FMV, and how… seamless the overall artstyle feels. While there’s generally a split — gameplay segments being CG while story segments are FMV — it’s generally cool how elements from one can blend into the other, such as ‘real’ objects that do things in game when you interact with them, or greenscreening real actors into CG backgrounds. It’s not exactly something unique to this game — adventure games like Harvester or Darkseed had you play as FMV actors in a CG world — but this feels so much more seamless than the contemporaries I’ve seen: it never feels like the two separate artstyles are in conflict, and a lot of the transition shots between gameplay and story feel super clean. Beyond that, I’m just mostly a fan of the environmental design. The game just really captures the aesthetic of a run-down bar, from how all the clutter constantly lining the floor feels absolutely huge from the perspective of a cockroach, in addition to having some imagery which feels genuinely striking in just how yucky it feels, from all the corpses and the general super sorry state everything just seems to be in. There were points where I was kind of excited to see what exactly was placed on the next screen, whether it be a broken mirror, a... lovingly depicted rat corpse, or the messiest kitchen top I've ever seen. It's a real 'damn bitch, you live like this?' kind of experience, and the game nails that feeling perfectly.

I do think, however, that some of its aspects often come at the expense of each other. While the FMV backgrounds do look great, and aesthetically do a great job at showing off how awful it is, it sometimes makes it difficult to tell where the exact borderlines between surfaces are, often causing movement to feel like you’re getting stuck on nothing, or brute forcing against a surface until the game arbitrarily lets you through. Pushing things around with my head — the only way you can really interact with the world as a cockroach — always felt finicky, sometimes causing me to spend too much time trying to find the arbitrarily correct spot so that I could do what I was meant to do, or often making stuff like the fight with the spider (where you have to rotate a cigarette butt in a specific direction) much trickier than it was intended to be. You have tank controls, which… only exacerbated a lot of the above problems, often making getting a specific angle of direction much harder than it needed to be or often making me mess up when my goal was to rotate something. Even with the cockroaches (and cutscenes) guiding me vaguely in the direction I needed to go, the game… suffers from the same issues a lot of early adventure games do where it’s often not clear what you can or need to do, which can result in moments where without a walkthrough you just feel kind of aimless on where to go.

And those problems… definitely do suck, especially since a lot of these just feel like limitations of the time rather than legitimate oversights, and with something with this much passion and ambition behind it it does feel lame that it ultimately gets let down by itself, but even then, there’s plenty to at least recommend this game for. With a gameplay conceit that feels super unique, even today, and an artstyle that really seamlessly blends together two different graphical style — in addition to providing a striking and fitting aesthetic — Bad Mojo is a game unlike… a lot of others, and uses its abnormalities to stand out for the better. 7/10.