Strangeland

About Strangeland

Strangeland is Wormwood Studios' second game, released by Wadjet Eye Games in May 2021 after almost a decade of work as a follow-up to Primordia. It is a classic point-and-click adventure in detailed pixel art, fully voiced, with hours of original music.

You wake in a carnival that is not part of the real world, and watch a golden-haired woman throw herself down a bottomless well for your sake. Ravens jeer at you. An eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a misshapen mermaid and a telepathic starfish offer clues, and from the top of a towering roller coaster a shadow shrieks. Until you destroy this Dark Thing, the woman will keep jumping, falling and dying.

You explore dozens of rooms, many of which change as the carnival grows more twisted, gather otherworldly tools and win strange allies. Puzzles often have more than one answer: one player wins a carnival game by sharpshooting, another by electrical engineering. Death has no grip on you here, and you use that to your advantage. An in-character hint system is there if you want it.

The horror is surreal and sad rather than sudden: freakish bodies, a death that repeats, and a story about identity, loss, self-doubt and redemption. It takes about five hours, and different choices lead to different endings. It suits players of dark adventure games such as Fran Bow, Sanitarium or the Rusty Lake games.

How to play Strangeland

1. Buy it on Steam or GOG for Windows, macOS or Linux.
2. Click to walk through the carnival and look at and talk to everything.
3. Collect tools and items and use them on the world and its denizens.
4. Try different approaches; many puzzles have more than one solution.
5. Use the in-character hint system if you are stuck.

Tips

• Revisit rooms as the story moves on; the carnival changes.
• Since you cannot die for good, try the risky options too.
• Turn on the annotation mode on a second play to see the references explained.

Questions