Strangeland

Strangeland is a point-and-click adventure set in a nightmarish carnival. You awaken as a golden-haired woman throws herself down a bottomless well for your sake. To stop her from falling and dying again and again, you must destroy the Dark Thing shrieking atop a towering roller-coaster. The connection between the carnival and the real world is the story’s central mystery, and finding a way out is its central challenge.

Explore the carnival

You search the park for clues and encounter jeering ravens, an eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a mismade mermaid and many other inhabitants. The eccentric cast also includes a sideshow freak, a telepathic starfish, an animatronic fortune-teller and a trio of masqueraders. Dozens of rooms have variant versions as the carnival grows more twisted, and the game’s pixel art is presented at 640x360 resolution.

Solve its enigmas

You gather otherworldly tools and win strange allies to overcome obstacles. You can forge a blade from iron stolen from a ravenous hound’s jaws 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. Death has no grip on you, and you can use this slippery immortality to gain an edge over your foes.

Puzzles can have different solutions, and you can choose your own approach. You might win a carnival game with sharpshooting or electrical engineering, or decipher a strange prophet’s wordplay or find visual clues scattered through the environment. An optional, in-character hint system is available. Choices and puzzle solutions can also lead to different endings.

Story and extras

The story explores identity, loss, self-doubt and redemption. A full professional voice-over and hours of original music accompany the game, which takes about five hours to play. Developer commentary and an annotation mode, with on-screen explanations of references woven throughout the game, are also included.