Waxworks (Amiga)
Waxworks is a horror themed role-playing game released in 1992 by Horror Soft for the Amiga, Macintosh and DOS based machines.
The plot of the game involves undoing a curse on your family. Apparently, at some point in history, the player's ancestor cut of Ixona's hand for stealing a chicken. Ixona happened to be a witch and she placed a curse on your family. This curse basically makes it so that whenever twins are born in your family, one of them turns out evil and does very bad things. You inherit a magical wax museum from your uncle and must use this magical wax museum to travel back in time to prevent the curse from ever being placed.
The game is divided into several sections, each with its own time period. Themes include ancient Egypt, medieval Transylvania, Victorian England, the industrial revolution time period, and the time period of Ixona herself.
Waxworks is played from a first person point of view and features a point-and-click interface. Generally, the goal in each time period is to retrieve a special item from the evil twin of that era. Once you have collected all of these special items, you can then attempt to defeat Ixona herself to try to prevent the curse from ever being placed.
There are some criticisms of the game including small game maps and an overemphasis on combat. However, the graphics, sound and music are pretty solid and do a good job of creating a horror filled atmosphere. The way the game is separated into different time periods also makes for pretty good variety.
Waxworks was re-released on GOG using DOSBox for compatibility with Windows and Mac OS. As I look now, it is currently available for only $1.49 here: https://www.gog.com/en/game/waxworks. I mean you can't get a much better deal than that. Images above are from the Amiga version of the game but there's not really any significant differences between the DOS and Amiga versions of the game. The DOS version even uses a similar 32-color palette to the Amiga version.
Read more: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2024/12/07/waxworks-amiga/
Those damn chicken thieves!
I can also imagine some of the outcry the media might have had with the image of the chick with a cut throat!
I think they could get away with more stuff with computer games than with consoles. This game could have never been published on a Nintendo or Sega system. But even the Commodore 64, for example, had Strip Poker.
I find the plot very interesting, time travel, evil twins and all for a curse that was for stealing a chicken hahaha, no doubt very special, the truth is great as the old titles with a little limited graphics managed to create so well the atmosphere of terror.
Reminds me of the Elvira games.
I did a post on at least one of those too! But it was a really long time ago...
https://ecency.com/retrogaming/@darth-azrael/elvira-ii-commodore-64
Crazy to have someone with a throat slit as the thumbnail 😂
(Edited because I thought it was a protagonist, but nope. That's because there's a stage where you definitely can end up like that...)
More than anything because the way I heard of this game was from a Creepy Bad Endings video that, both because of the grotesque way they were to the point that he didn't like to bring them up...and probably because YouTube could throw a fit (although back then it wasn't as common), never showed the death screens - but said they usednto creep him out a lot.
But the foreboding and detailed artstyle of the rest of the game definitely painted you a picture such as dying by zombies or dying by toxic mutants. As you said, gruesome death scenes.
However, even though this is not my kind of game - mainly because I don't really focus on point and click games like this, it is still super cool to hear from someone else about this game without looking it up myself.
I didn't even know it was available on GOG, but it's great that the game isn't stuck in legal limbo like so many other games like this.
I've never been a huge point-and-click fan myself though they can be a fun diversion sometimes. I remember a little later when Myst was all the range but I had absolutely no interest in that game. I had a friend that had a game called Phantasmagoria though and that one, another horror themed game, always looked pretty interesting.
GOG has lots of great stuff though there's lots more that it will probably never have. Games that use licenses from movies, comics, etc. are perhaps the most difficult to get re-releases for. I'm sure there are all kinds of legal hurdles that just makes it not worth it.
@darth-azrael, I paid out 0.081 HIVE and 0.026 HBD to reward 3 comments in this discussion thread.
I just saw your review and it reminded me that I always wanted to try this game out. I clicked the GoG link ready to buy it and apparently, I already did. Going to give this game some attention this weekend, thanks for the reminder.
The content, well, PC games certainly were unique back in the day, weren't they? I thought Abadox on the NES was graphic, then I discovered the PC gaming section at the local Montgomery Ward and Sears (I would have never guessed they would sell that type of game). It was wild.