Tell me if this has happened to you before. There you are, trying to write an ad for your new Voodoo private eye business, when a woman walks in. A looker at that. She has a job for you, to find out who she is, as she has lost her memory. As far as lost items go, they are not the easiest thing to find, not even for a Voodoo Detective, which is your name and profession, by the way.
She leaves you a clue after telling about herself, how she woke up and learned she is the wife of a local businessman, who is slowly taking over the whole island. She doesn't believe it, she doesn't remember a thing of it and it doesn't feel right. There's something else as well, the previous night she had a dream of an old man at the crossroads. He gave her a pendant, which she was grasping when she woke up. Not much of a clue, an old man in the dreams, put the pendant is something at least.
There you are, a premise for the mystery to solve: a woman in trouble, mysterious dreams, and local businessmen. It's a soup, if there ever was one, but a soup nonetheless, a mess for you to tackle. So that's exactly what you do.
A couple of things. While Voodoo Detective is a mystery game, it's not really a detective game. Not in the style of collecting clues and solving things. No, this is, despite having been released in 2022, a rather old-school adventure game, where you run around and solve puzzles. Mostly very fair puzzles, but nonetheless the kind of puzzles you need a modicum of out-of-the-box thinking to figure out. Some of the puzzles you even solve before you have to solve them, narratively speaking, as if you are a seasoned adventure gamer, you spot the puzzles pretty quickly. Or the game, maybe perhaps intentionally, perhaps because of lapses in design, tells of them before you even notice you need to solve a puzzle.
Besides the more typical adventure game puzzles, some puzzles require you to create voodoo spells. You aren't a Voodoo Detective for nought, after all. These spells are merely just checking out a list of items you need for them and then creating the spell. Nothing too taxing, really, and reading the book and checking your inventory is generally a good indication of which spell you need. Not that there aren't hints in the game, but like I said, these aren't tasking brain twisters.
How much you'll enjoy Voodoo Detective really depends on whether you like this kind of old-school gameplay. It's not the most difficult game of this kind, but liking games like the Monkey Islands or Sierra titles is something that is going to help. Also, this is a comedy, often a 4th wall-breaking comedy, where the main character Voodoo Detective often seems to be aware, that he is, well perhaps not in a game, but in a world where you can expect a title card to burst in a flames in your office.
Another thing of note is, that in this era of low-resolution homages to the times long gone, Voodoo Detective stands out by its fantastic graphics. The background art suits my liking very well and the animation is very well done. Not perhaps the same quality as in something like The Curse of Monkey Island or Love for Sail!, but definitely very well done.
The voice acting and music are similarly well done. Overall, there's very little to complain about in terms of Voodoo Detective's visual or aural qualities. It is top-notch work, really, which is refreshing to see and welcome to the adventure game milieu.
The game itself isn't terribly long. A seasoned adventurer, and perhaps not even so seasoned one, will breeze through it in 4 to 5 hours. So it's not a game that feels overly long, especially as I did like the visuals and the humour of it.
Voodoo Detective is not a perfect game, what is really, but it's a solid game. If you are looking for a more comedic entry to the genre, you could make a worse choice than Voodoo Detective. You can get it from GOG and Steam. Besides, even with full price, it's only around 12 euros.
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