We were honored to see Strangeland take home four Adventure Game Studios Awards today:
Best Character Art
Best Puzzles
Best Voice Over
Best Programming
Moreover, our programmer/triumvir James Spanos was rightly honored with a Lifetime Achievement award. James not only single-handedly coded Primordia, Strangeland, and Until I Have You, he also helped code The Cat Lady and Mage's Initiation, and either ported or polished almost all of the games in the Wadjet Eye catalogue.
The last two awards are especially great given how rarely the programming of adventure games gets recognized, even though it is an indispensable part of an engaging player experience.
If you'd like to read about some of the award-winning coding feats James Spanos pulled off for Strangeland, check out his dev diary on the subject.
If you want to read about award-winning character art, you can read Victor Pflug's portion of our interview in Monstrum.
If you'd like to read more about the philosophy beyond our award-winning puzzles, you can read my (Mark's) dev diary on "The Power of Puzzles."
Finally, if you want to see a behind-the-scenes look at the award-winning cast of voice actors, led by Abe Goldfarb and directed by Dave Gilbert, check out this YouTube playlist.
We're truly grateful for these awards, but as always, the thing that matters most is knowing that they are the product of player's expressing their support for the game, and we are always mindful of the many ways players have given that support -- sometimes vocally with Steam reviews, sometimes tangibly with fan crafts, and sometimes silently simply by playing our game. We love you.
Strangeland
Wormwood Studios
Wadjet Eye Games
2021-05-25
Singleplayer
Game News Posts 47
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Very Positive
(719 reviews)
http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/strangeland/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369520 
Strangeland Linux Depot [4.1 G]Strangeland Steamdeck Depot [4.15 G]Inscryption (Linux) [4.12 G]
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.
- OS: Ubuntu. Debian
- Processor: 2.7 GHz Dual Core (and above. can run on single core)Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL. DirectX 5
- Storage: 2 GB available space
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