Waxworks

About Waxworks

Waxworks was made by Horror Soft, the British studio of the Elvira games, and published by Accolade in 1992 for MS-DOS and the Amiga. It was nominated for RPG of the Year by Computer Gaming World. The idea came from the 1988 film Waxwork. GOG has sold it since 2009 for Windows and Mac, running in DOSBox.

When you were eight, your twin brother Alex vanished into the mine tunnels under the home of your Uncle Boris, owner of a waxworks full of demons. Twenty years later Boris dies and leaves you the collection, along with the news that Alex is alive but possessed by a five-hundred-year-old curse placed on your family by the witch Ixona. The only way to lift it is to step into the exhibits themselves.

Each exhibit is a world: a pyramid in ancient Egypt where a cult serves Anubis, a vampire's domain in medieval Transylvania, Victorian London stalked by Jack the Ripper, and a mine overrun by plant mutants, before the witch's own period. You explore in first person, move with point-and-click controls, fight in real time by aiming at an enemy's body parts, level up and solve puzzles. You start each world from scratch, without the items of the last. You can take the first four in any order you like. Ixona's comes last.

The game is remembered for its gore. Deaths, yours and others', are shown in full-screen detail that reviewers at the time called gruesome and stomach-turning. It suits players who like old dungeon crawlers and do not mind graphic violence, and fans of Horror Soft's Elvira games.

Players on GOG still grumble about the fights. Hits land more or less at random, so you'll reload a lot early in a world, then find you're cutting things down in one blow once you've levelled up. The puzzles get kinder words. They're logical, mostly a matter of finding every piece and carrying it to the right spot. HowLongToBeat puts a run through the main story at about seven hours.

How to play Waxworks

1. Buy it on GOG and start it; GOG's edition runs the DOS game for you on Windows or Mac.
2. Talk to the characters in your uncle's house and pick an exhibit to enter.
3. Move through each world with the on-screen arrows and examine what you find.
4. Fight by clicking the part of an enemy you want to hit, and watch your health.
5. Pick up and combine items to solve each world's puzzles, then confront its master to lift that part of the curse.

Tips

• Save often and in more than one slot; death comes quickly.
• Items do not carry over between exhibits, so use what you find in each world.
• Read what people tell you: clues to the puzzles are often in the dialogue.
• The London exhibit is mostly about puzzles, a change of pace if the fighting wears you down.
• Keep two save slots going, one in the waxworks lobby and one inside the exhibit. A wrong use of an item can leave a world unwinnable, and the lobby save lets you start it over cleanly.

Questions