'Strangeland' Is a Stunning Adventure Game Built Around a Dull Concept

Strangeland is actively weird. Staged in the twilight space of dreams in a pseudo-carnival filled with bizarro characters, it asks you to accept its twisted logic and pursue a thematically simple plot: you are a Man who witnesses a Woman destroying herself over and over again in this dream world, and you want to save her from that fate. Along the way, you will ride on a giant cicada that quotes psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, you’ll rewire a carnival shooting game, and you’ll insult a telepathic squid to death. It is certainly a melange of different vibes and tastes, all crammed together into a discrete package that is undeniably an adventure-game-ass adventure game.

After finishing it in about three hours, I came away with two minds about Strangeland. On one hand, it is definitely operating in an aesthetic space that video games just do not engage with for the most part, and the surrealism of its spaces and puzzles is delightful. On the other, it operates in some broad, mythical strokes that it seems wholly uninterested in complicating or thinking through, meaning that all the interesting stuff is still borne on the back of a fairly trite story about a mentally flawed Man and an eternally-dying Woman who serves as both a reason for, and a symbol of, self-improvement. 

On that aesthetic level, Strangeland is knocking everything out of the park. Wormwood Studios, the game’s developers, have shared some of their influences in developer blog posts, citing Ray Bradbury, Goya, Mervyn Peake, and Stephen King as having an impact on how they think about the genre they are working in. Notably, Strangeland is billed as a “psychological horror game,” and it lives in that space constantly, never leaving an opportunity on the table when it comes to uncanny, fleshy, or disgusting images. The stuff of nightmares is constantly appearing because the location, Strangeland, is itself a kind of self-referential nightmare, a bent place where faces can be removed and bottled mermaids can spring back to life to mourn their own death.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t hesitant about these aesthetic moves that Strangeland makes before I played the game. Wormwood Studios’ Primordia is one of my favorite games, and the first images of Strangeland gave me the opposite vibe of Primordia’s humanless, science fiction future that deals with the long legacy of a destructive human race. That game was made up of crunchy robots just making their way in the world, and kept itself grounded in its fiction. Strangeland is obviously leaning more heavily on fantasy, specifically works like Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and its demonic carnival that comes to a small town and warps and destroys many of its inhabitants. Being “grounded” is antithetical to the psychological horror and fantastical setting that Strangeland is after, and before I started the game I was afraid that it could easily tend toward Insane Clown Posse territory: carnival as parody, as sarcasm, as a cavalcade of played-out references.

Thankfully, Strangeland’s themes are less freak shows and hatchet men than it is Bakhtinian carnivalesque, bringing together symbolic entities so that they can stage some psychological themes that the player, as their character, can work through. The game’s key figures resonate heavily with the occult, with repeated reference to the Tarot and Norse mythology. This lends itself well to the step-by-step vibe of adventure games, where finishing one task gives you conditions for the next one, because they each feel like a discrete puzzle piece in the grand scramble that is the psychological drama unfolding in the game. Figuring out how they all “fit” together is much like figuring out how all the items and contexts of item use in adventure games work in general, and these narrative and mechanical systems all flow together gracefully. Adventure games are based on giving players small, discrete puzzles they can solve either in the abstract (such as a puzzle about manipulating a light array by pressing buttons in the right order) or with the tools at their disposal (like creating a grappling hook and using it to manipulate a switch they cannot reach). There are no surprises on that front with Strangeland, but these characters and their gross circumstances means that some puzzles are solved by doing things like poisoning a small homunculus and feeding it to a cannibal. You’ll feed the many mouths of a sewn together monstrosity in order to snatch out its single eye with your bare hands. The mechanisms and puzzles that these things fit into are familiar adventure fare, but what exactly you’re doing is unique to this game.

What it all shakes out into is something that feels delightfully like a Clive Barker tale. In stories like “The Hellbound Heart” (which Barker adapted into Hellraiser) or “In The Hills, The Cities,” Barker was able to take fantastical concepts and keep pushing them and pushing them until the reader sat in a purely surreal space surrounded by horrors. And yet the thrill of those stories was based on the fact that their characters had crossed some kind of barrier between our world and another, and it was not like stepping through a wardrobe but rather was like passing through a protective veil that had been, until that moment, keeping our world safe from another, worse place. Strangeland is one of those worse places, and the stories of woe and violence, and the images that accompany them, are going to stick with me for a long time in the same way that a Barker story would.

This is also where Strangeland’s biggest problems emerge. Clive Barker often used (and uses) his fiction to point to the nightmares that our social world papers over, and those often tended to the allegorical. His “Midnight Meat Train” is a story about the secret rulers of the city and their murderous desires, but it’s also a story about how moving to a new place means taking on its culture in ways that undermine and sublimate your desires in the spirit of getting along. Psychological horror, in a broad sense, is about staging the psyche as a fictional place and then watching characters ping pong off each other in ways that heighten or resolve Big Issues.

The tension here is that Strangeland isn’t just psychological horror, but is instead a kind of meta game that knows the “rules” of the genre. The primary antagonist, something called the Dark Thing that torments the Man and keeps the Woman in a cycle of constant life and death, talks about rules and games constantly, winking at the player while also telling us exactly what genre constraints this story is beholden to. Strangeland regularly ruminates on the function of the dream space, directly stating several times that whatever we are playing is a drama within the protagonist’s head and operating on that logic. The end effect is a bit like watching Cabin in the Woods with less explanation, which robs the game of some of its potential magic. I’m not sure that psychological horror needs all of its weirdness explained and psychologized away.

The real problem with this is that the game wants the player to understand that all of this drama is centered on that Man and Woman relationship, literally expanding a generic heteronormative drama of mourning man and tragic woman into an entire metaphysics. The world itself is just a theater to rehearse this over and over again, traumatically, and this point is made so often through the game’s three hours that it almost became painful. This is never problematized or questioned, never inverted in a way that Barker might in some of his more critical work. For a game that is so experimental and strange in the realm of visual aesthetics, the narrative core that supports those aesthetics is hoary and brittle. It’s thematically “universal” in how it imagines grief and self-pity, but that supposed universality looks almost parochial in the landscape of media in 2021.