![]() Forge a blade from iron stolen from the jaws of a ravenous hound and hone it with wrath and grief charm the eye out of a ten-legged teratoma and ride a giant cicada to the edge of oblivion. Indeed, figuring out where-and who-you are is one of the game's many mysteries.Īs you explore Strangeland, you will need to gather otherworldly tools and win strange allies to overcome a daunting array of obstacles. Strangeland, of course, is most definitely not the real world. In their funhouse mirrors, their freaks, and their frauds, we see hideous and haunting reflections of ourselves, and we witness the wonder and horror of humanity in just a few frayed tents, peeling circus wagons, dingy booths, and run-down rides. Even in the real world, carnivals occupy a twilight territory between the fantastic and the mundane, the alien and the familiar. For almost a decade, we've been working on a worthy successor to the fan-acclaimed Primordia, and we are proud, at long last, to share our second game. Strangeland is a classic point-and-click adventure that integrates a compelling narrative with engaging puzzles. All the while, a shadow shrieks from atop a towering roller-coaster, and you know that until you destroy this Dark Thing, the woman will keep jumping, falling, and dying, over and over again. You seek clues and help from jeering ravens, an eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a mismade mermaid, and many more who dwell within the park. ![]() Seeing how the reading reappeared later in the narrative is a neat touch, and if anyone wants to make a point-and-click tarot adventure around this idea, I’d love to play it.You awake in a nightmarish carnival and watch a golden-haired woman hurl herself down a bottomless well for your sake. It’s a nice balance of arcane divination, mystery, and a pinch of meta-commentary-after all, tarot was mostly originally used as gaming cards. One of the neatest parts of Strangeland is, in fact, a tarot-reading sequence that requires a little bit of basic memory, dramatic introspection and imagination. Doing more with less is underrated, and it’s hard to create something vast and unknowable if you build it around recognizable genre tropes that prevent you from doing something truly interesting. Strangeland is, as the designers have discussed via Steam posts, an exploration of sadness prompted by events in their personal lives including this Gormenghast quote: 'In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.' "There are oblique hints of Peake’s Gormenghast books: not so much the dysfunctional pseudo-medieval politics, but the oppressive, inescapable atmosphere and the glacial illusion of 'progress' as you creep through the game. It’s a polished, well-written, well-acted and intriguing interactive nightmare that is easily worth your time-if you can stomach the unrelenting depressive tone and disturbing imagery." Unlike their earlier postapocalyptic sci-fi adventure, Strangeland is a surrealist, psychologic horror adventure that feels like it was drawn by H.R. "Wormwood Studios made an impressive debut in 2012 with Primordia, so expectations were high for their long-awaited follow-up, and it does not disappoint. Who has the time? But it's a bit of a shame if you're one of the latter, because the depression goo is mixed up with some very nice puzzle design." You'll either love everything that is implied by a creepy carnival and funhouse mirrors and the black dog and the giant crab, and engage really well with all the back-and-forth wordplay and the layers of meaning, or you'll hate it. ![]() You can rip through Strangeland in a morning, if you feel like it. I mean, it's famously a failstate in most games, and Strangeland is making a definite choice - one that contrasts with the ultimate revelation that in reality death is pretty final. It's an interesting suberversion, because dying is often how you know you've failed a puzzle in a point and click game. " As a work of horror Strangeland is doing way more interesting things than yer Outlasts, for example.
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