strangetomato | Belladonna Cove: Watervista Place = Baba Yaga's Hut

I've always been fascinated with the odd little witch cabin on the "hidden" (it is if you don't have a camera mod, anyway) Watervista Palace lot on the edge of Belladonna Cove. It really begs for more development, and gets me thinking about the witches and their mythology. I've been planning to build up more of a hidden town for the witches out there, where the Cordial's actually live, when they're not blending in with the rest of society as normal sims.

Do you see them? Perhaps if we pull the camera away a little...

Look at the base of the stairs! :D

I always thought this pair of staircases seemed like they were meant to look like feet, but this confirms it. Those darker patches of terrain are obviously references to the clawed chicken feet of Baba Yaga's hut.

Here are some artistic interpretations that I dug up through google image search:

Now that this has brought it back to my memory, I remember this little bit of folklore from some computer games of my childhood (the King's Quest series, maybe? They were full of myths and fairytale stuff from different sources). There's something extremely terrifying about a house with legs, not to mention the skulls. It's strangely familiar, even the first time you hear about it. I think it must be part of our collective landscape of nightmares that we have as children.

Now I'm going to need to find some cc skulls to try to bring out this look a little more. Have anyone extracted the skull from the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, I wonder?

Don't you love finding things like this in the game? I'm always impressed at all the small details the designers have worked in there. ^_^

ETA: I just did a search on this, and there's also a very small entry (it's actually in fine print) on it in the Sims Wiki.

... and the Baba Yaga connection was already mentioned on MATY, MTS2, and a bunch of other places, so this isn't really breaking news.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Right you are! And I didn't even play that, so maybe I'm just remembering it from the back of the game box. I do recall seeing that around that time, so that's probably where I picked it up from.

There's something similar in King's Quest 4, but the witches are in a cave and they share a single glass eyeball between them in order to see. I guess they were based on the Graeae of Greek mythology. They were also quite terrifying.

I should find a collection of those games, so I can play the newer ones.

Have you ever played 5 Days a Sranger? It's a freeware game in the same style, and again, terrifying, even to me now. (Well, more the sequels, but still...) If I had played that as a child, I would have slept with one eye open for the rest of my life, I think.

I'm a big fan of that stuff, too. A lot of my photo and printmaking work was about that at one point. I was really interested in the stories of martyred saints, too. All that stuff is super interesting to me.

Was that King's Quest 4? I played that game to death and I can't remember that bit XD The Pandora's Box bit I recall though, and the ghosts at the old house. I especially thought the mummy in Pandora's Box's room was scary. And I was always afraid of falling off the cliff going up to Lolotte's mansion. Oh and the forest with those scary trees... and that troll. Ok so as a kid I thought it was a fairly scary game, but in my defense, I was about 9 or 10 years old XD

I think they not too long ago rereleased King's Quest, Police Quest and uh.. Space Quest again. Like, all the games of one series on one disc.

I never played it, I know of it but I never sat down to play.

My favorite of Sierra's adventure games and I'm dunno maybe you'd enjoy them too are the Gabriel Knight ones. They're a bit more mature and are pretty well researched on their topics. Different type of, "mythology", I suppose but very well written. I love those.

Yeah, that's the one. I found a lot of it very creepy, too. The music really adds to that, especially when something suddenly appears. That was probably the best of the bunch for me. I loved all the little quests, like the ogre's cabin and being swallowed by the whale. And Genesta's island was beautiful. I really loved King's Quest 3, too, though.

All the orginal games? That's cool. I can download the first in each series on Abandonia, but I'd love to play through all of them.

Hmmm, I'm not familiar with them, but I'll have to check them out. Thanks for the recommendation! ^_^

Especially the gruesome ways you could die if you got caught at the wrong moment. Getting dragged around by your braids by the ogre and such. Scary! King's Quest 3 had that tension at the beginning with trying to escape the wizard's home. And I loved making the potions (I love that kinda stuff in games, it's why I adored Legend of Kyrandia 2: Hand of Fate as well, cause Zanthia, the main character, gets to make potions and such).

Yeah, it's on amazon and such it doesn't cost too much either. The downside is that it's a very simple package, a box, a cd with the games on. The manuals are PDF files. It's fairly spare :P But the King's Quest one, for example, has all 7 (we're not counting 8, 8 didn't exist) games on it.

I really do recommend it. Especially start with Sins of the Fathers (the first one) if you can find it anywhere, it's got a good, suspenseful story and good puzzles.

Belladonna Cove: Watervista Place = Baba Yaga's Hut

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