This is absolute poetry. Beautifully written and powerfully atmospheric. I could feel just how much grief went into the creation of this deeply-personal game. I can't imagine many would make it through without feeling a strong resonance with at least a scene or two.

I love how unflinchingly bizarre the world of Strangeland is. Many scenes reminded me in the best way possible of the less-gratuitous (in terms of shock-value, at the least) David Firth animations, albeit far more heady; particularly the cicada and teratoma interactions. Every corner of Strangeland is dripping with Giger and Poe and various mythological and biblical allusions. These references thankfully serve to strengthen the unique narrative of Strangeland -- it never feels like a hollow vessel for previous works. In fact, there's a great comment or two in the game about leaning heavily on quotation.

The puzzles and interactive gameplay elements serve their purpose well in creating a connection to the narrative. I never felt too stuck or frustrated, and a simple call to the operator could point me in the right direction if I'd overlooked a cue.

I'm not particularly keen on replaying this one any time too soon, however. It was just a lot to take in! I finished Primordia earlier this week, and will almost certainly return to it sooner than this, despite the excellent evolution in design. All of that being said, I'm very happy to have had the experience and give Strangeland my highest recommendation.

Completed with 100% of achievements unlocked. Well, I've finally managed to find a Wadjet Eye that I didn't particularly enjoy. In fairness, much of that is down to the setting and aesthetic - Strangeland is point-and-click puzzle adventure in a psychological horror form, which really isn't appealing to me, but the Wadjet Eye pedigree drew me to try the game regardless. More objectively, there's not really much to the story here and taking place across a relatively small number of areas, the puzzles are mostly quite simple. I can't, however, fault the game on its dedication to the horror genre - the pixelart graphics are as painstakingly detailed as ever and (optional) commentary and explanatory text call out frequent points of fine detail in the setting and dialogue that I'm sure would be entirely overlooked by many, while still working effectively to craft a convincingly coherent, if fantastical world.

Not to be cute or anything, but this really is one of the strangest games I’ve played this year. Not in terms of the affectations that it puts on, its aesthetic ambiguity/distance from the norm and that which it subverts, because as we’ve begun to see with nostalgic recreations/realisations of the impressionistic lenses we viewed older PSX and 1-bit graphical works with, the aesthetic plasticity that games manage to command coherency with is aggressively broad and getting broader every day; it’s strange for the fact of its singularly most remarkable strength being that it writes dialogue with a mostly consistent and interesting lens of euphonious first principles. Games writing, as commonly bemoaned for being subpar as it is uncritically and unsubstantially championed against other media’s language, is not known as broadly being something which draws new players to the medium nor what keeps players around. There are outliers, Torment, KRZ, Disco Elysium, but they prove the rule: games writers typically have an enormously difficult time putting scripts into their works which harness the broadness and depth of language commensurately with any media which has allotted spoken or written communication in their art. Canned dialogue, utilitarian conveyance from justification to justification, is the expectation that is most often held and only sometimes met. Despite this however, the macro writing of games, at a AAA level a bit more and at the indie level a bit less, actually works on a functional level which many American films and genre fiction novels fail to achieve (although it is indie games which more often prove the writing rule wrong well as being the game sphere who have more immediate goals of furthering design ideas entirely divorced from traditional narrative and dialogue, so while they are often less seen on 2nd base, it’s usually because they hit homers or aren’t at the stadium). The reasons for progressing through points A, B, and C on the way to Z are hit with decent grandeur. This is a function of editorial, mechanised production, but is nonetheless impressive enough to be noted, especially considering that games are meant to juggle narrative justification with a rote gameplay loop which, in its repetition, cannot be seen as a reliable force for development. This somewhat consistent proficiency of games generally is part of what makes Strangeland such an outlier: its macro-writing is horrible, worst in class pap that manages to sink below not only the high grade of adventure games, which alongside RPGs are usually the best examples for games writing at both the macro and micro level, but also down into and beyond the depths of rushed FPS campaigns and mobile puzzle games. But, the writing on a line to line level is legitimately tuned to the patter, rhythm, and musicality of speech seen in many good romantic and modern poets: often in Strangeland, a line sings with a macabre and tortured appetite such as those written by Dylan Thomas, Rimbaud, or Anne Sexton. The grand-scale editorial writing is largely nonfunctional as games writing, at its worst when functioning as the brilliant summarised “puzzles as plots” definition by Ian Danskin, but it never feels against the grain of what games writing should contain when placed within the context of its lovely prose, which is to say that they never feel migrated from a poetry collection or intimate film scene.

There are small other successes in Strangeland, certainly the pixel graphics are a secondary, if less spectacular, achievement. In failures though, the game is plentiful. The puzzle designs are both barren and simple, issuing for the Stranger a path which is easily tread, features no compelling thought, and is shorter than a good exercise outing should demand. At around 2-3 hours, Strangeland somehow finds time to make a weak impression across nearly all of its facets. But, the writing is so surprisingly well founded at the level of sentences that following the team is an easily justifiable and worthwhile endeavour.

While this game nailed the dreamlike and macabre atmosphere it was attempting, I think that's all it really has going for it. The lack of a cohesive narrative and the smallness of the space made this game feel pretty slight.

I also thought the dialogue was trying too hard. It was either too obviously dark and gritty or too embedded in metaphor to mean much.

I kept waiting to be able to say, "Oh, this is what this game is about." But it's just a mismash of themes and imagery that never coalesces.

Strangeland starts out with you playing like a man I a straight jacket inside a carnival of sorts. The art style is dark, dreary, depressing, and looks great. The point-and-click adventure pixel art of yesteryear looks great and I love this style of visuals. As you talk to the talking entranceway you gain entry to the main area of the game and like every adventure game ever made you progress by exploring, talking to people, and picking up objects.


The main goal of Strangeland is to fight something called The Dark Thing and you are trying to find a golden-haired woman who you think is your lover, but you aren’t sure. You can acquire hints for the game at any time by using the payphone in the main area and this is a really big help. There isn’t much to the controls as you just walk around picking up items, some might need to be combined, and figure out where to use them.

The largest downside to Strangeland is its complete lack of world or character building. Each character speaks in pointless riddles that have no meaning and I don’t understand why. This world looks interesting and I want to learn about it, but it’s so short, about three hours long, and there are so few characters that I feel I have rushed along to the end. Even the ending didn’t really make much sense after all of what you go through feels pointless. It’s not really hard to figure out what items go where you don’t get that many, but there are a few puzzles in the game and they don’t feel like puzzles. I just randomly clicked around and solved them, so there’s that.


This is also a very small world. There are many 8 main screens you visit, and the second half of the game reuses these screens when you are in Deadland. And again, I can’t stress how awesome the art is. There’s gore, gross fluids, strange pits that lead to nowhere, and sadly it’s all smushed into this tiny play area with not much to do. It’s not possible to get lost, and once you exhaust all the dialog options with a character you can no longer talk to them. Your ultimate goal is to kill The Dark Thing, and I believe the ending had a choice, but I wasn’t sure. It ended so abruptly and unsatifactorily that I just shrugged in the end. I really enjoyed the art and the voice acting, but that’s all there really is to the game.


In the end, Strangeland is so short that I don’t have a lot to say about it. It looks good, it’s not super cryptic like most adventure games are, and the voice acting is good, but the story just doesn’t make sense and we never get to know more about the characters. What is Strangeland? Why am I here? How did I get here? Why am I in a straight jacket? Nothing is answered or explored which is the main reason adventure games exist. To explore a world and story and characters. This feels like mostly an art exhibit and nothing more.