Strangeland
Lives up to its name, if not its promise.
Publisher Wadjet Eye has a reputation for great modern point-and-clicks, both developing its own titles and helping others’ projects to launch. Strangeland feels at home in that stable, but it struggles to live up to the company’s better efforts.
Upon entering the carnival, you find a woman tearfully throwing herself down a well. Although your character’s memory is gone, he knows that she means something to him, and so the objective of the game is to save her. You’ll repeatedly see her jump in, each time unable to stop her, and as you progress she haunts your journey.
Strangeland walks a darker path than you might typically expect from the genre, but it still follows certain rules. You have an inventory, you can combine items before using them, there are puzzles typical of the genre – it’s all very familiar. Slightly less common, but present here and very much welcome, are multiple endings. It’s not entirely clear how many there are or how to access them, but I found three new ones by reloading the final autosave. One was extremely grim; all felt surprisingly abrupt.
The art is superb. Anything that isn’t run down or twisted is strangely organic; the environments are flavoured with a hint of HR Giger. This means they can be difficult to immediately discern fine detail in, which means that objects you can pick up or interact with can be easy to miss. This is sometimes the greatest challenge that a puzzle presents, as most of them are otherwise pretty simple.
If you’re just looking for a surreal horror adventure, Strangeland can absolutely deliver that. However, the further you stray from the developer’s messages and intention, the more difficult it is to enjoy. The conundrum is this: Considered purely as a point-and-click game, it’s not great. Considered purely as an artful exploration of difficult subjects, it’s largely a success. The truth of the situation, of course, is that it’s a mix of the two.
LUKE KEMP
The world of is an incredibly bleak one. As the perpetrator of an unspecified crime, you’re rocketed onto a watery planet to rinse it of its natural resources. When you’ve mined enough metals – and then banked them in exchange for cash – you can buy your freedom for the very reasonable price of 30 million credits.
Oh, it’s a joke number at first, as you dive into the ocean again and again, chipping bits of copper in exchange for chump change. But as you exchange that change for upgrades – a bigger air supply here, a sharper pickaxe there – you can delve deeper into the ocean, where the rarer, more valuable minerals lie.
If all that sounds eerily familiar, then you’re probably thinking of Subnautica, which does the aforementioned stuff but over quite a few hours, and over quite a big ocean full of sea creatures, wrecks, and alien mysteries. Oceanwork compresses it down to an hour or two, while looking like it was regurgitated by a PlayStation One. But it’s a big enough sea, and beautiful in its own way.
TOM SYKES
The cliff-notes version of if it had existed on the original PlayStation.
Subnautica,