Waxworks

Waxworks is a horror adventure with RPG elements from Horrorsoft, in which the player is transported through a cursed wax museum into several separate stories set in different eras and places, from Victorian London stalked by a murderer to ancient Egypt full of curses and a vampire bloodline stretching across generations of one family. Each chapter offers its own puzzles, dangers, and real-time combat situations similar to the studio's other games, and a character's death often means having to start that episode over from the beginning, which makes the game unpleasantly unforgiving.

On the Amiga, the game benefited from detailed hand-drawn graphics for each scene and a dark atmosphere reinforced by music and sound effects that nicely complemented the horror themes of the individual stories and their differing period settings. The game's structure, divided into several interconnected episodes that converge in a final confrontation, was unusual at the time of release and gave the player the feeling of going through a collection of ghost stories rather than a single linear narrative with a clear beginning and end, with each episode retaining its own rules and dangers.

Waxworks built on the success of the earlier Elvira and cemented Horrorsoft's reputation as a studio specializing in darker, more mature adventures with RPG elements and a raw sense for horror grotesquerie. Linking several genre horror vignettes together in a single museum was an original storytelling trick at the time, allowing the game to draw on various horror traditions without sacrificing overall cohesion. Thanks to its uncompromising tone and inventive episodic treatment, it still ranks among the curiosities of the Amiga catalog today, even though its difficulty and at times brutal trial-and-error system suits players familiar with older, less forgiving adventures better.

Why play: If you like darker, episodic horror adventures, Waxworks offers imaginatively linked vignettes from different horror traditions, though its brutal difficulty suits seasoned players of older adventures better.