Strangeland
PC
The title ‘Strangeland’ openly promises something weird, and the setting of Wormwood Studios’ (Primordia) twisted point-and-click adventure, made in collaboration with genre vet Wadjet Eye Games, delivers on that pledge. In this murky otherworld, a thin path over a yawning abyss leads to a circus entered via a sinister clown’s gaping maw, its tongue your welcome mat. Later you meet a giant cicada which acts as a fasttravel system, a talking furnace, and an acid-spitting cosmic horror abomination in a glass case – and that’s not even the most disturbing creature you’ll encounter.
It’s cut from a similar cloth to Cyberdreams’ adaptation of I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, while its eerie, dreamlike quality and moments of body horror (presented in grainy close-up) are redolent of Dark Seed. Though its dialogue can sometimes be similarly opaque, it’s better at subtly seeding mysteries and hinting towards solutions with audiovisual cues – a flash of light here, a raven’s call there. While you will be mocked for using it, there’s a phone that offers more direct clues, but with repetition built into its story (there are many ways to die, though the world is compact and you’ll respawn with your held items and progress intact), you soon tune into Strangeland’s wonky logic.
SICK JOKE
Games that trade in weighty material have a tendency to take themselves too seriously. Strangeland, however, recognises that comedy can be a coping mechanism, and its gallows humour is one of its greatest assets. Not all of its jokes land, but sometimes that’s the point: each time you die, the clown will tell you a deliberately bad variant on a classic gag. Some of the deaths you suffer are designed as dark punchlines, and you earn an achievement for finding them all.
Within this unsettling pixel-art world are elements that are troubling in different ways. The amnesiac protagonist – unkempt, with greasy hair and wild eyes – wears a straitjacket, while the first thing you see when you enter the circus is a woman throwing herself down a well, motivating him to try to save her. It might be an unconventional rescue attempt, but it’s no surprise that these familiar tropes ultimately amount to a man confronting his inner demons. Grief, loss, self-harm and suicide are thrown into the macabre mix, alongside nods to Nietzsche, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and Norse mythology. Strangeland’s script attempts to reckon with the way it presents its themes, suggesting we all use familiar symbols – such as a snarling black dog – to make sense of what we don’t understand. Yet its moments of self-admonishment (“In this story, there’s only room for one woman,” mock three Moirailike sisters, wearing masks to present as men) simply feel like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it.
Among this “grab-bag of myths and masks” are moments of genuine intrigue, but its vague storytelling lacks the specificities that would make it universal; its metaphors, by contrast, are overexplained. An ‘In Memoriam’ note suggests the creation of Strangeland may well have been cathartic for the development team, but by the time its climax delivers a glimmer of hope, you wish it had been a little weirder.