Even has its own Van Pelt
There are a number of official Jumanji video games, but they don’t seem very Jumanjish to me. You’ve got a bunch of nineties-to-noughties minigame compilations, a pachinko adaptation, and a few reportedly dismal games based on the recent Dwayne Johnson movies, also feat. Steve off Infiniminer and Amy Pond from Dr Avenger: Endgame.
Ludogram’s just-announced streamerbait co-op horror game Invokyr seems to be cleaving a lot closer to the 1995 movie, which is itself based on Chris Van Allsburg’s book from 1981. The game sees you and up to three others playing a cursed boardgame that transforms the house it’s played in.
The one immediate complaint I have is that Invokyr’s boardgame looks mega simple. Going by the screens, it has you rolling dice to move one piece to the end of a path. Not exactly Twilight Imperium then. Still, there’s talk of “special dice”, and the cursed boardgame itself is voiced by Baldur’s Gate 3 dungeon master Amelia Tyler. It’s going to have a certain stage presence, if nothing else. Hopefully it’ll do some crafty things with the movie’s literal “we have colonialism at home” theme. There’s a Van Pelt-adjacent “great white hunter” in the trailer, below.
The transforming house around the room containing the boardgame is a creature of Blue Principled abandon. It’s big and mazey enough that you might get lost, claim the developers, and is capable of various generated biomes – “jungle, ice mountain, oversized toy chest”. You’ll have to worry about traps and also, creatures such as carnivorous plants and puppets in cages, each with a different mode of stalking. Sort of looks like they hunt the same way in the video, admittedly: sneaky-sneak, peekaboo, chomp!
I’d like this to have the variety of Lethal Company‘s menagerie, in which some anomalies can only be thwarted by failing to notice them. A Lethal Company Jumanji mod would be fabulous, actually. I’d also like it if the board game in Invokyr were a smaller, real-time version of the house, with a very small model of the player looking down at a very small boardgame that contains another, even smaller model of the player, etcetera.
At the very least, there needs to be a trap that maroons one player in another world until they have a beard bushy enough to sleep in. It’s out… in the future. You can read more on Steam. Favourite cursed boardgames, anybody? Robin Williams RIP.
