You wake in a surreal carnival, where a woman cries out to you before leaping to her death. Can either of you be saved? The denizens and devices of Strangeland answer with riddles, puzzles, and warnings of a Dark Thing lurking at the park’s peak. A new adventure from the creators of Primordia.
All Reviews:
Very Positive (666) - 94% of the 666 user reviews for this game are positive.
Release Date:
May 25, 2021
Developer:
Publisher:

Sign in to add this item to your wishlist, follow it, or mark it as ignored

Check out the entire Wormwood Studios franchise on Steam
 

Reviews

“Strangeland is a surrealist, psychologic horror adventure that feels like it was drawn by H.R. Giger, designed by M.C. Escher, and written by Aeschylus.”
Adventure Gamers

“Worthy of a tragedy of Sophocles staged by David Lynch .... Brilliantly written, strangely funny, and stuffed with visual and narrative ideas that are intelligently and coherently interwoven. ... Borders heights that most video games do not even attempt to approach.”
Canard PC

“Great puzzles, character writing, and multiple possible solutions give credit to its players while personalizing the path to one of the endings. Overall, Strangeland is a complete experience that masterfully balances grotesquerie and relatability.”
KeenGamer

About This Game


You awake in a nightmarish carnival and watch a golden-haired woman hurl herself down a bottomless well for your sake. You seek clues and help from jeering ravens, an eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a mismade mermaid, and many more who dwell within the park. All the while, a shadow shrieks from atop a towering roller-coaster, and you know that until you destroy this Dark Thing, the woman will keep jumping, falling, and dying, over and over again....

Strangeland is a classic point-and-click adventure that integrates a compelling narrative with engaging puzzles. For almost a decade, we've been working on a worthy successor to the fan-acclaimed Primordia, and we are proud, at long last, to share our second game.

Strangeland is a place like no other. Even in the real world, carnivals occupy a twilight territory between the fantastic and the mundane, the alien and the familiar. In their funhouse mirrors, their freaks, and their frauds, we see hideous and haunting reflections of ourselves, and we witness the wonder and horror of humanity in just a few frayed tents, peeling circus wagons, dingy booths, and run-down rides. Strangeland, of course, is most definitely not the real world. Indeed, unraveling the connections between this nightmare and the real world is the game's central mystery, and finding a way out is its central challenge.

As you explore Strangeland, you will need to gather otherworldly tools and win strange allies to overcome a daunting array of obstacles. Forge a blade from iron stolen from the jaws of a ravenous hound and hone it with wrath and grief; charm the eye out of a ten-legged teratoma; and ride a giant cicada to the edge of oblivion.... Amidst such madness, death itself has no grip on you, and you will wield that slippery immortality to gain an edge over your foes.

Navigating this domain of monsters and metaphors will require understanding its denizens and its enigmas. Unlike many adventure games that offer a linear experience and single-solution puzzles, Strangeland lets you pick your own way, your own approach, and your own meaning—one player might win a carnival game with sharpshooting, another by electrical engineering; one player might unravel a strange prophet's wordplay while another gathers visual clues scattered throughout the environment. Ultimately, Strangeland's story will be your story. You are not the audience; you are the player.



  • Approximately five hours of gameplay, replayable thanks to different choices, different puzzle solutions, and different endings
  • Breathtaking pixel art in twice Primordia's resolution (640x360—party like it's 1999!)
  • Dozens of rooms to explore, with variant versions as the carnival grows ever more twisted
  • An eccentric cast, including a sideshow freak, a telepathic starfish, an animatronic fortune-teller, and a trio of masqueraders
  • Full, professional voice over and hours of original music
  • A rich, thematic story about identity, loss, self-doubt, and redemption
  • Integrated, in-character hint system (optional, of course)
  • Hours of developer commentary and an "annotation mode" (providing on-screen explanations for the references woven throughout the game)


At Wormwood Studios, we make games out of love—love for the games we've spent our lifetimes playing, love for the games we ourselves create, and love for the players who have made all of those games possible. We know that players invest not just their money and time in the games they play, but also their hope and enthusiasm. And we want to make sure that players receive a rich return on that investment by creating games that provide not only a fun, challenging diversion for a few hours, but also lasting memories to keep for years.

We think the best way to achieve that with Strangeland is to adhere to the genius of the adventure genre: the marriage of challenging puzzles and thrilling exploration, on the one hand, with an engaging narrative, on the other. At the same time, we've tried to remove the punitive aspects of adventure games (deaths, dead ends, illogical puzzles, pixel hunting, backtracking, etc.). Within this framework, we add uncanny visuals, memorable characters, and thought-provoking themes. The result for Primordia was a game that has received thousands of positive player reviews, and we have refined our approach further with Strangeland. We hope it will not disappoint the players who have given us such great support and encouragement over the years! And we hope that it will find a place in the hearts of new players as well.

System Requirements

Windows
macOS
SteamOS + Linux
    Minimum:
    • OS *: Windows 7,8,10, XP SP2
    • Processor: 2.7 GHz Dual Core (and above, can run on single core)
    • Memory: 2 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Direct3D, OpenGL, DirectX 5
    • Storage: 2 GB available space
    • Sound Card: Any
* Starting January 1st, 2024, the Steam Client will only support Windows 10 and later versions.
    Minimum:
    • OS: 10.11
    • Memory: 2 GB RAM
    • Graphics: 640x360, 1.8 Ghz system
    • Storage: 4 GB available space
    Minimum:
    • OS: Ubuntu, Debian - (64 bit)
    • Processor: 2.7 GHz Dual Core (and above, can run on single core)
    • Memory: 2 GB RAM
    • Graphics: OpenGL, DirectX 5
    • Storage: 2 GB available space
    • Sound Card: Alsa/PulseAudio/DSP

More from Wormwood Studios

What Curators Say

50 Curators have reviewed this product. Click here to see them.

Customer reviews

Review Type


Purchase Type


Language


Date Range
To view reviews within a date range, please click and drag a selection on a graph above or click on a specific bar.

Show graph



Playtime
Filter reviews by the user's playtime when the review was written:


No minimum to No maximum
Display As:
Show graph
 
Hide graph
 
Filters
Excluding Off-topic Review Activity
Playtime:
There are no more reviews that match the filters set above
Adjust the filters above to see other reviews
Loading reviews...