Vodou: The Afrofuturist Reckoning of a Forgotten Future

Vodou: The Afrofuturist Reckoning of a Forgotten Future

How Juju Games Is Turning the Galaxy Into a Griot’s Playground

You’ve heard this story before but not like this.

A dusty outlaw. A dying planet. A fight against empire. Except this time, the outlaw speaks Yoruba, the planet remembers its ancestors, and the empire fears what it tried to erase.

Welcome to Vodou, the debut epic from Juju Games and a bold new chapter in the long, winding road of Africa reclaiming its place in speculative futures.

Science fiction has given us galaxies teeming with Norse gods, cybernetic samurai, and empires modeled after Western Europe, feudal Japan, or imagined Rome. We’ve seen the future wear many faces except ours. Africa, when it appears, is too often the exotic jungle world, the war-torn backwater, the mystical footnote. Or worse completely erased. There’s a long-standing stereotype that African stories belong to the past, that our myths are relics and our futures depend on borrowed dreams. We are cast as sidekicks, spiritual guides, cursed tribes, or silent backdrops. Never the pilot. Never the main quest.

That ends here.

Afrofuturism isn’t just science fiction dipped in Ankara cloth it’s a time machine built from ancestral memory and speculative brilliance. It’s what happens when you honor your dead and still build the stars. In Vodou, Afrofuturism isn’t a flavor. It’s the foundation. Every star system pulses with echoes of oral tradition. Every weapon hums with a song from a forgotten griot. Every decision is shaped by the weight of legacy and the desire to break free from it.

Creating Vodou wasn’t just about making a game. It was about correcting an absence. Our team came together asking questions no one else seemed to be asking: What if the first bounty hunter in space was inspired by Bass Reeves, the legendary Black U.S. Marshal who helped tame the American frontier? What if the Orisa the pantheon of Yoruba deities were reimagined as cosmic forces that shaped entire galaxies? What if colonization happened in the stars, and Africa not only survived it, but fought back with cunning, culture, and raw power?

We didn’t want another sci-fi universe where African aesthetics were thrown in like seasoning. We wanted a universe where the window itself was African and the view through it was infinite. Vodou is our answer. It’s a genre-defying creation we call a Jollof Western a cousin to the Spaghetti Western, but spiced with ancestor reverence, moral ambiguity, and the fire of resistance. Instead of tumbleweeds, you get asteroid belts. Instead of cowboy saloons, shrines carved from meteorite bone. Instead of lone white gunmen, you get Bazz Reeves: the Reaper of Hadari.

Bazz is a Markai part lawman, part ghost roaming a fractured galaxy with a mask full of secrets and a heart weighed down by justice deferred. He doesn’t just enforce the law; he wrestles with what law even means in a world where empires have rewritten the truth. Beside him rides Amani, a Nubian warrior born in blood and exile, her blades sharp with history. Together, they walk the knife-edge between vengeance and virtue, hunting bounties while uncovering a conspiracy that ties their personal losses to the collapse of entire star systems.

This is not a game that asks you to forget where you come from. It’s a game that insists you remember. That your ancestors fought, danced, sang, and dreamed. And that in dreaming, they built galaxies you were never supposed to see. But now, you will.