Voodoo Vince Remastered

Voodoo Vince: Remastered brings the cult 2003 character platformer back to current platforms in high definition after more than thirteen years off the shelves. The premise is the central joke and the central mechanic at once: Vince is a voodoo doll, and the way you defeat enemies is by inflicting damage on Vince himself. The pain travels — via voodoo logic — to whoever the spell happens to be targeting at that moment.

The story takes Vince from the streets of New Orleans into the depths of a Louisiana bayou as he searches for his keeper, Madam Charmaine, who's been kidnapped by Kosmo the Inscrutable. Over the course of 30 detailed levels — crawfish-laden swamps, an imp-and-zombie graveyard, the French Quarter rebuilt as a fantasia, a network of boggy sewers — Vince picks up over 30 voodoo attacks that ask him to perform increasingly elaborate self-inflicted damage. Running under falling safes, jumping into high-speed blenders, leaping under collapsing rubble, getting struck by lightning — all of these hurt monsters elsewhere on the level while Vince himself emerges unscathed.

Vehicles and minigames break up the platforming throughout: Vince pilots a fanboat, a submarine, an airplane, and at one point gets a lift from an unusually cooperative rat. The cast of characters skews exactly as offbeat as the rest of the design — Ginger Dead Men with attitude problems, a pair of intoxicated gas pumps offering a fiery challenge, and other extras drawn from the same New Orleans-flavored sense of humor.