Toyhouses of ones and zeros
Scaling a perilous mountainside, a lone hero clad in sword and shield lifts themself over the bluff, scrambling to their feet. They take a moment to rest in the elevated quiet before turning to the towering structure that beckoned them: monumental in scale, the mansion is a behemoth of a building, stretching farther than the eye can see.
It’s breathtaking in its construction, but what interests the hero more is the mansion’s residents (and their riches). They reach for the heavy-set entrance, adorned with a meager doorknob and encroaching rot, as a deafening screech fills the sky. A smoking jetliner appears on the horizon, tumbling out of the sky towards the mansion. Any sense of logic is tossed aside as the hero dashes to the front door, scrambling to twist the knob. It’s locked. A jaunty tune rings through their head as their first trial reveals itself with no time to waste.
///
The first screen of Tarotica Voo Doo. The player stands in front of a locked door, with only the foyer past it visible.
If you wanted to pick a single word to describe Tarotica Voo Doo (TPM.CO Softworks, 2017), it’s “anachronistic.” Taking heavy inspiration from PC-98-era dungeon crawlers, text adventures, and old fashioned flipbook animation, Tarotica Voo Doo is a top-down adventure game where the player, represented primarily by a cursor on an overhead map, explores a massive mansion, defeating monsters and solving puzzles along the way. The mansion is a monster of its own and where the game truly shines; a massive series of linear switches which in operation give Tarotica Voo Doo a very mechanical, toy-like physicality to an otherwise familiar collage of genres. But for all its playful intricacies, this is a game shaped by a decades long tortured development, and to get the full picture one has to know the history behind it.
Development kicked off in 1993, the original dev cycle seeing Ikushi Togo – the one-man band behind TPM.CO Softworks — building a castle on a faulty foundation. The MSX architecture, the cornerstone on which Tarotica Voo Doo relied, was already on its way out, lagging behind both contemporary hardware and the dawn of the 32-bit era. This made it a bastion for the burgeoning homebrew market, being relatively simple and lightweight to work with, but the writing was on the wall regarding the system’s future.
By the time the game’s belabored development seemed to be wrapping up four years later, the initial release of Tarotica Voo Doo had been pushed to drop during Comiket 53 — a biyearly doujin, or self-published work, convention — during the winter of 1997. Seen next to the newly released Playstation and Sega Saturn, the MSX was a relic. Still, Togo soldiered on, ready to show his work to the 300,000 strong audience of the convention after years of working in isolation. Fate, however, had different plans, and with little fanfare a disk drive crash sentenced the project to an early grave, erasing the source code and any chance of the game ever being played. Tarotica Voo Doo was dead.
A warrior clashes with a fiery creature in an underground cavern. The basement of Tarotica Voo Doo's mansion is an expanding mystery throughout the game.
The game languished in obscurity over the next two decades, remembered only by the lone man behind it. His attempts to resurrect the project were met with an underwhelming reception, leaving him to slowly recreate his doomed dream with little hope anyone else would care.
With these bleak prospects in mind, a chance showing at BitSummit — a Japanese indie game development expo — in 2014 ignited a flame under Togo’s feet. For the first time Tarotica Voo Doo was getting attention, praise, and support. Still, a persistent issue with the game revealed itself. For players, the experience was always the same: they’d be drawn in by the game’s now even more antiquated presentation, but invariably they would get lost, and without the dev there to guide them abandon the game unfinished. The truth was, were the game to release in this state, it would be a disaster.
Now more than two decades in the making, Togo continued laboring away, attempting to resolve player frustration while retaining the core mystery of the game. In Chronicles of Tarotica Voo Doo, a design doc bundled with the game, he compared the three year process of redesigning and playtesting to a sort-of cultural heritage restoration, where an educationally-centered focus was necessarily to know exactly what to change, what to commit to, and what to scrap entirely. In 2017, Tarotica Voo Doo finally released on Steam, still bearing the hallmarks of its MSX lineage. The original engine woes had been fully embraced – as Togo put it:
“My personal philosophy on making games is that they have a kind of universal appeal across generations. Hence it makes no difference if the game is made with the MSX.”
This tragic and circuitous development history can be felt throughout Tarotica Voo Doo, in its layered construction, understated but rich presentation, and a playful design that draws from new and old games alike. It is a game of deliberate movements and harsh consequences, every door opened, torch lit, and creature crushed a commitment which could end in disaster. The world of Tarotica Voo Doo is expressed through flip-book style animations, and that same low-frame rate style plays directly into the mechanisms at play, every slash executed with a question mark between the pages. It’s a meticulous process that honestly could fit wonderfully on something like the Playdate, the boutique hand-cranked handheld from Panic. This tangibility links every movement in the game – combat is mechanical, movement is grid-based and clicky like dragging a piece across a game board. Even the various doors and switches act as very real levers and buttons with their own satisfying feedback. In its most basic essence, Tarotica Voo Doo is a toy.
///
The fully expanded map of Tarotica Voo Doo. The player defends against a clothesline, one of the game's many strange enemies.
While point-and-click adventures and text-based games run deep in Tarotica Voo Doo, it takes even greater inspiration from board games and puzzle boxes. Each action links to something else within the gloomy halls of the hilltop mansion. Every step is another part of an expanding puzzle, room after room filling with new details, new levers to pull and switches to hit, all building to a conclusive solution where every single piece of the mansion falls into place. Acting as an amalgam of videogames and mechanical toys, Tarotica Voo Doo takes the best aspects of both and melds them into something unique. In a sense, this mash-up of playful design sensibilities gives the game a distinctly contemporary identity, despite its development starting over two decades ago.
Despite lacking any immediate signs of direct influence, the dip-switch flipping mechanisms of Tarotica Voo Doo draw parallels to modern games attempting to act more as toys; baubles to experiment with, touch, and feel. Games like Metamorphabet (Vectorpark, 2015), whose childlike whimsy around the building blocks of language aim to enthuse a young audience, or Islands: Non-Places (Carl Burton, 2016), a virtual smorgasbord of microscopic locations that exist to be explored through simple rotation and manipulation. Even in attempts to more traditionally gamify the digital toy, as in Please, Don’t Touch Anything (Four Quarters, 2015), the result typically is little more than an automated audio-visual showcase.
Returning to the hallowed halls of the haunted mansion on the hill, this sense of physical play becomes apparent. From the tactility of unfurling blinds and twisting puzzle pieces, to the rigid, rhythmic push-and-pull of combat, Tarotica Voo Doo seems to revel in its pronounced textures. Once again quoting Chronicle of Tarotica Voo Doo, Togo perhaps expresses this design philosophy best, stating:
“Recent games are digital, and I feel that in some way there has become a kind of disconnect from the actual goal, such that the necessary elements to properly express the world are being rounded off and discarded.”
In aiming to center this manual feedback that he saw games of the time lacking, Togo instead created something of a perfect middle-ground: not quite an in-depth video game, as one would expect from a MSX dungeon crawler, but neither a meager toy to fidget with and discard. Tarotica Voo Doo embodies both ends of this spectrum, capturing the RPG thrills of exploration, combat, and puzzle solving, while also the pure joy found in simple childhood toys.
Roxy S. (She/Her) is a game dev and writer. You can find them on Twitter @squigglydot_.
If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with a friend. If you'd like to help keep the lights on you can support KRITIQAL on Ko-Fi.