Museum has 4 large exhibits that takes you to 4 different time periods.ġ. The main objective is to collect a special item from the evil twin ancestors before venturing into the Ixona's forest to undo the family curse. The player can use Uncle Boris' crystal ball to get hints. In each time period, the player needs to pick up items, solve puzzles, avoid deadly encounters and engaging in combat with various opponents. The game is divided into five different time periods: Ancient Egyptian, Medieval Transylvania, Victorian England, Industrial Mine and Ixona's cottage. Each one is challenging for different reasons but all retain the horror theme.Waxworks: Curse of the Ancestors is a first-person, action adventure RPG horror game. There are other various differences in the levels as well, but that’s just an overview. And finally, one has unbeatable enemies which constantly chase you through the main streets and can kill you instantly. One has virtually unbeatable enemies that can only be killed with a certain weapon with limited ammo.
One has an endless swarm of zombies that needs to be fended off. One is a humongous, yet claustrophobic, maze full of random instant death traps and punishing puzzles. There are incidents I’ve mentioned that I’m convinced are accidental on the part of the programmers, but most of the time it’s obvious that punishing design was part of the developers’ agenda.Įach of the four levels explores different ways to make that horror experience complete. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s frustrating because of poor design or by intention. There’s never any immediate indication of when it’s turned unbeatable, so you’d better hope you kept a lot of backup save files or don’t mind starting over. Certain actions can make the game unbeatable, and sometimes the game even tries to make itself unbeatable and you have to find a way to stop it. Every time you die you’re shown a disturbingly detailed image of your mutilated body, and the artists put the effort into drawing a different picture for each of the dozens of possible deaths. You will end up dying a lot, often randomly and without any warning. After wandering through a maze for an hour only to find that there’s no in-game map can be a humbling realization, even more so when you find out two hours later that there’s no way to heal the wounds you acquired earlier and now you’re facing a challenging monster. The game does you very few favors and seems to be designed to torment the player, which I suppose is the point. Next to its age, the most prominent detail anyone should notice about Waxworks is that it is hard. Of course a much better solution would be to design a system that doesn’t completely suck. In the game’s defense however, the level designers took its constraints into account and implemented a few features that work with it, including ways to avoid combat or strategies that involve the three sections of the screen you can attack. The gameplay here is so shallow that there’s no reason not to just click over and over in one place until you happen to eventually win the battle. It’s an awkward combination of real time combat and RPG style chance. It consists of clicking on whichever third of the screen you want to attack and after a delay your character swings his arm and will perhaps hit his target and he will perhaps do damage. To speak more broadly, I think it can be universally agreed upon that the combat system is terrible. Of course, these are both specific incidents that may have just affected me personally. I even managed to run into an obscure bug that froze the game once. Nowhere is there any indication that a specific order is required, nor could I see any reason why my instinctive order shouldn’t have worked. For example, there is a section that requires several puzzles to be completed in no apparent order, however it became clear after floundering for a long time that there actually is a required order for no reason other than that’s how it was programmed. I get the feeling that the only playtesters were the developers themselves, or if not they must have had access to some special debug version that excluded battles and gave them hints. The software programming and design of Waxworks have numerous flaws. You can see glimpses of modern survival horror elements and some parts feel uncannily similar to titles like Resident Evil. Certain aspects of Waxworks have been long extinct from modern gaming, but others are still around.
I like old games I haven’t played before because it’s interesting how styles have radically changed over a short two decades. I had never played it before and was able to enjoy it, so despite the decrepit technology it must have an appeal in something besides nostalgia. But considering it’s sold by a site called “Good Old Games” I assume that this should be a given. The first thing any modern player will notice about Waxworks is the fact that it’s old, and in some ways hasn’t aged well.
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