Take Myst... and splatter it with rotting food. When you're finished, cook up a haunting, ominous soundtrack and make the whole thing three dimensional. Then maybe, if your character is totally, viscerally disgusting, you've got Pulse's Bad Mojo.

In Bad Mojo you get to play one of them: a roach. You've been transformed into the grossest form of insect life and you want to turn back. It ain't easy. You start in a drain pipe and from there things get interesting. You don't have hands--you don't even have a 'manipulate' icon. All you can do is crawl (and maybe push things). You can't see the world too well (threats can come from anywhere). And finally: you're food.

That's Pulse's Bad Mojo and it no-kidding-totally-one-punch blew me away. They have created something that may win the coveted title of being a truly unique experience. Of course, with a game like Bad Mojo, there's only one way to do this.

Step Into the Roach Motel

The game is lavish, disturbing, and (in a way) beautiful. Every scene is painstakingly dirty and the roach effects are chilling. From its twitching antenna to the way it flails with its legs when trying to swim, it's convincing enough to make your skin crawl. The game is disturbing: and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Picking your way through someone's dinner, innocently left on the table, is a wicked thrill. It's all photo-realistic and in your face. The controls and the concept are dirt simple: four arrow keys. The sound is perfect. While great graphics, an excellent musical score, and a singularly focused concept make the game outstanding, they don't make it unique.

On the other hand, your character's ability to climb walls, come at scenes from multiple angles (including up and down)and go inside and under obstacles does (at least in my experience). When you climb a stack of old newspapers in Bad Mojo you can go up, down, or all the way around the whole stack (four sides!). Often problems that can't be solved in two dimensions are easier in three. The design team did a great job of making it work.

There's an amazing depth of things to see, read, and even remember (certain events spark memories played out in QuickTime movies). Every object is cracked, worn, stained, smeared, rusted... get the picture? The sounds when your roach tries to cross a trail of blood, running from the mouth of a slain rat, are all but stomach churning. I loved it!

One more thing: When you install the game you get to play "pong" with a rotating globe of the planet earth. The game is three dimensional with the bouncing globe rebounding from the 'front' and 'back' of the monitor as well as the sides and top. It's the best install for its time I've seen since Pulse's first release, Iron Helix (wherein you get to watch a T-Rex bite, throw in the air, and devour a business man while the game installs). They get big points for this: when you shell out fifty bucks for a game you want gratification the second after the CD goes in the drive.

Not For the Faint of Heart

If you don't like puzzle games, there's not much action in Bad Mojo. There aren't people to talk to and there isn't treasure to get. The world isn't a beautiful place and it doesn't seem likely to get better. It may not be the game for everyone.

There are a few technical/story board glitches as well: I had some problems restoring a save game (they went away after three restores but until then, I couldn't move my roach back or forward). Michael Sommers does some pretty hideous overacting in the opening sequence (that's nothing new to computer games) but still pulls it off.

If you don't like roaches then you probably don't want to get anywhere near this (unless your therapist demands it). When you enter a wall there are pipes crawling with them; mashed potatoes partially conceal one; they scamper across the screen with a realism obviously attributable to the entomologists who worked on the game.

Bad Mojo doesn't make roaches the good guys. It doesn't make them the bad guys. It makes them roaches and for that it succeeds where almost everything else I've seen (usually trying to make stiff little icons into living, breathing people) fails.

For what it tries to do, Bad Mojo wins big.

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