Voodoo Detective has been on my to-do list since the days of the primordial soup. This beautifully illustrated point and click adventure is criminally underrepresented in the world of reviews and exposure. There could be two reasons. 1) Point and clicks are a niche, irrespective of your bias. 2) The game has voodoo glitches.
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Touching upon the exposure, the game didn’t appear on the review code circuit. Equally, it wasn’t broadcast in the right locations or picked up enough buzz from the community. To claim that I was there at the beginning, watching The Beatles at the Jacaranda Club and all that other ‘I’m a true fan’ nonsense, I had been following Short Sleeve Studio’s adventure early on – watching dev logs with eagerness. Alas, it all went quiet until a chance sighting on Steam enabled a purchase for the dreaded backlog, where it sat for a year.
Voodoo Detective climbed the priority pile a month or so ago on the Steam Deck. Remember: this was a game for me, something I purchased out of love for the genre and the investment in all those developer logs at the beginning. William Christopher Stephens, who voices the titular sleuth, is solid throughout, and the music is phenomenal. Not used lightly, the sultry jazz tones boast a full orchestra, and it sets the mood.
Voodoo Detective Review
Voodoo Detective is a tale of corruption, deceit and murder, all to the flavour of some voodoo shenanigans. The detective of the same name is hired by Mary to investigate her bouts of amnesia and to uncover the significance of a pendant she owns. This takes our hero on a relatively swift journey across Zo Wanga, New Orleans and… other plains.
As a point and click, it’s your job to interact with objects and combine them within the inventory to make several concoctions. Traditionally, the genre likes to use illogical combinations, often resulting in ‘clicking everything’. However, in Voodoo Detective, you have a reference book from your Grammy that lists ingredients for spells and potions relevant to the task at hand.
Disappointingly, the game is relatively brief and has limited locales. At least in completion, there’s no backtracking to the same locations continually, as the puzzles are relatively straightforward, except for some body-smuggling items. In hindsight, the very witty dialogue will often lace the answers in Voodoo’s rhetoric.
Sounds Amazing, But…
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with the controls. Instead, you’re left to explore and indulge in conversation. These animated talking head moments with characters are wonderfully acted, as if the casting director had handpicked the best Saturday morning cartoon actors to take the helm. The only niggle, is there are times you might experiment and repeat actions. Instead of clicking through a repeated conversation, you have to move the cursor to a dedicated ‘skip’ button. What an inconvenience!
However, this isn’t the genuine issue with Voodoo Detective – even the duration isn’t such a negative as it leaves you wanting more in a good way. The problem is with the technical glitches. The game played beautifully on the Steam Deck, then one morning, without warning, it would not load past the disclaimer screen at the beginning. Checking for updates and reinstalling multiple times did not resolve it. Fortunately, the save game carried over to my laptop.
Eric from Short Sleeve Studio reached out to say that, unfortunately, this is to do with the program the Steam Deck uses, Proton, which causes some compatibility issues with some Unity titles that are fixed on a case-by-case basis. A ticket to correct this was issued in 2022, but still not been fixed.
Creating a new save game on the laptop and then trying again on the Deck didn’t fix it either, and ended up bricking the game. The adventure could continue at my desk, but there was another situation where interacting with items would show the dialogue, but not speak it. The backgrounds continued to be animated, and the music maintained its pace, but the game itself froze. The only remedy was to reload the game, which had to be done half a dozen times. As you can assume correctly, I did finish the game, and there were no further technical issues.
As for content, Voodoo Detective isn’t entirely original, but it has a very compelling story that is complemented by fantastic illustrations, animations, and, of course, sound production. In terms of production and aesthetics, this is comparable to Grim Fandango and Sam & Max. However, I would have liked the game to be longer and include a few more cutscenes as a reward for my efforts. What do you mean, it’s not about me?
Voodoo Detective Review Summary
Voodoo Detective is an excellent point and click adventure that is stylistically up there with some of the best, and the story is decent, too. The technical issues were frustrating, mainly since it performed so well on the Steam Deck, and it felt a little short. Surely there’s a spell in Grammy’s book to extend the tale? Sequel?
