Belladonna Cove: Watervista Place = Baba Yaga's Hut

[strangetomato]

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.











Comments

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I nearly died laughing when I first played through PQ. So many times they get things so very right. It's exactly the stuff we'd always make fun of as kids.

Thanks for the recommendation! I just might do that, since the original isn't quite old enough to turn up for free download on Abandonia yet.

[meetme2theriver.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the reason it's not up as a free download is that they're making money off the game again through these remakes. Why waste good potential, eh? I don't think any of LucasArts' old games are up for free, though, not even the ones from the 80s.