Content Warning: This game and article discuss themes of suicide and depression.
The last time we saw Wormwood do a joint with Wadjet Eye, we got 2012’s Primordia, a striking point and click about robots at the end of the world. The small team’s art reminded one of the work of H.R Giger, and one would hope their next project would be about humans to take advantage of the body horror they could tap into. That has happened with 2021’s Strangeland, but it’s also a VERY different experience then you may have expected. What this is instead is a very personal project about death, memory, relationships, and possibly a lot more. They also got Mike Pollock, the voice of Dr. Eggman himself, to voice a giant clown head who you have to step into the mouth of to proceed to the titular Strangeland, and also said giant clown head makes you listen to a dark joke every time you die.
Yeah. This one is strange.
The narrative at play is extremely based in imagery and symbolism. You control the Stranger, a man who can’t remember anything, trapped in a strange carnival. In reality (or as close to reality as this game gets), what we’re experiencing seems to be a sort of mind world, plainly spoken later but pretty obvious from just listening to a few bits of dialog early on. What this world actually is never gets explained, but we don’t really need to know that. We only need to learn more about the Stranger through it, following along his quest and trying to find meaning, while having an antagonistic force in the form of a shadow creature called the Dark Thing that starts creating havoc and death later.
While nothing concrete is ever given, there are enough hints in the symbols used to start forming a picture, some symbols so blunt that the implications are just saying it without words. There’s a noose in a tree. The Stranger approaches some dangerous situations, like using the knife item on yourself, as “a way out.” There’s a black dog you have to deal with, a common symbol of depression, and the Dark Thing causes the Stranger to freeze up when it appears to destroy something.
Things just get more complicated with the many ways a mysterious woman is portrayed through the whole game, as it tends to bounce around from someone in a similar head space to the Stranger at his lowest, to a damsel in distress, to a living cadaver being torn apart in grotesque ways. While some ideas presented are obvious, others are more ambiguous, making the game open to a lot of interpretation, particularly when it comes to the Stranger’s faulty memory.
This is one of Wadjet Eye’s shortest releases, coming out around under three hours if using a guide or if you know what you’re doing. That said, it is a dense experience, with a ton of dialog to go through via a Sanitarium style dialog menu. Said dialog is genuinely interesting to read through, often coming from the bizarre and vague denizens of the carnival, and implying a lot about the Stranger’s situation. They’re also all horrible in unique ways, like an old man with no eyes who writes whatever words a raven says, or three women who may or may not be the sisters of fate dressed as ugly men with ridiculous looking and oversized masks (the masks are for your protection, as you die if they take off their masks).
Puzzles are logical if you tune yourself to the absurd logic of the world you’re in. There are a few stumpers here and there, particularly the fortune puzzle, but you can wrap your brain around them fairly quickly if you take a step back and approach the problem from a different direction. If you get stuck, though, there is a in-game hint line via the payphone – you just have to put up with someone with the Stranger’s voice insulting you for being a moron. It fits in context of the game and never gets annoying, but it might make you feel bad (you dummy).
You can also die with no real penalty, just warping back to outside Strangeland and having to interact with the clown head again, even getting an achievement for finding all unique deaths. Sometimes, dying is even mandatory, including to progress in certain puzzles. The game even wraps up with a homage of a LeChuck ending struggle you might see in a Monkey Island game, where you get stuck in a death loop and have to find a way out as you get moved around different screens. As an adventure game, Strangeland nails down all the fundamentals, shaves off the more annoying bits, and rewards creative thinking as you tune into its absurd logic. It’s a well designed world where getting lost in it doesn’t feel like having a lack of direction.
The only real sticking point for some will be the short length of the game, of which we can only recommend playing the game without a guide and talking with characters as often as possible for the full experience. You may want to wait for a sale, but the $15 price tag seems more then fair with the incredible sprite work and sound design to back the experience up. It’s one of Wadjet Eye’s best looking releases by a huge margin, both in its grody horror moments (which get very creative in their body horror) and its twisted “normal.” It’s a strange game with a ton of polish, the passion behind the project easy to see in every single screen and cutscene. A must for Wadjet Eye completionists and those looking for something and bit stranger in the point and click adventures.
