Adventure Gamers - Forums

I waited for this experience to settle, I hope it’s cool if I share a couple of final thoughts.

It’s a demanding experience. The puzzles are finely crafted and most of them work very well. The game’s length is fine enough. It’s visually stunning, if rather arduous in combination with the ambient/powernoise soundtrack, its themes, characters and the way it communicates with you.

The writing style is peculiar. It took a while to figure out exactly how to describe it. It’s not heavy-handed, per se, affected, or detached. Overly referential, maybe a bit, but just calling it that doesn’t do it justice.

This subject matter is generally (in other media) approached in a less challenging way: from melancholy to melodrama, trying to be real or consciously gimmicky, the emotional notes are easy to identify. They push the obvious buttons. Gloomy, sad, pity, tragic. “Strangeland” avoids the sentimental and goes for conveying actual pain.

It has many ideas that it bundles into themes, sitting on a stack of books with sticky notes between the pages. In the background, there’s a bulletin board full of interconnected pins in many different colours, with red threads spun between them, covering the surface almost entirely. There are polaroids, photocopied pages from books and handwritten notes, punctuated by question and exclamation marks.

But you can’t open the books. The game rests on top of the stacks, carefully balanced. You can read the sticky notes, but the rest is up to you. And with the lights on, you can see the board hanging on the wall, but in this darkness, you can only catch a glimpse every now and then.

Its horror is genuinely horrific. It also seems honestly personal, even when it isn’t pretty. I’m not much into horror, but I appreciate this approach. The reference-heavy internal proces on display is lonely and isolated, desperately reaching in different directions to make up for a lost center. It maybe a bit too heady at points, but on a visceral level, it hurts.

There is humour, both dark and more in jest, enough to take a breath every once in a while.

So.. good, then? Well, it’s consequent and it works. I do think it tries to go in too many directions to prove it’s foundations are legit, that the implied meaning is real, with footnotes. This results in three problems:

loss of immersion. The player tries to get all the references and the game becomes an Easter egg hunt of myth and psychology.

The game is like a personal bookshelf. The age-old criticism of obtuse puzzle design (the player has to retroactively read the creators mind) applies to the narrative here.

The sources the author relies on do not always tie into each other in an organic fashion. Some of its references, particularly those of sources that are on the whole underused, seem like stopgap solutions to otherwise barely connected narrative elements. This leads to a source overload.

I just read the comment by Wormwood_Studios, and I think I get the fear of being considered pretentious. It’s an odd and often uninspired charge at anything that attempts to be meaningful, artistic or otherwise deep.

I think pretense can be cringey, but so can earnestness. Pretense can also be a good thing: Jackson Pollock only had a vague understanding of things like the collective unconscious or the archetypes of Jung, but that left room for these ideas to mesh with his own creative impulse and the other influences that inspired him to create his art. The abstraction that follows loosely appropriated ideas provides space for art to grow on it’s own and space for the observer to have a personal experience.

The fear of being seen as suggesting, but not completely providing, (proof of) depth, has slightly overshadowed the space described in the previous paragraph. It becomes too dense, it has too much to prove regarding its source material, that it starts to rely too heavily on it’s source material. A bit more suggestion, pretense, if you will, wouldn’t have hurt.

That’s a courteous answer to a long-winded appraisal. 

It must be odd having people discuss your hard work and vision. How’s the reception been so far? If I were to review this, I’d like to be able to let it sink in for at least a couple of months, but that’s not really how these things work, I suppose.

By the way, I briefly mentioned the soundtrack, but it’s pretty wild. Bold choice as well. It could’ve been more of a synth-soundscape, couple of sad notes, catchy melodies, the works. But this was way better.

Very curious what you’ll come up with next time. If you’re willing to create another game!

Vegetable Party - 21 June 2021 03:51 PM

That’s a courteous answer to a long-winded appraisal. 

It must be odd having people discuss your hard work and vision. How’s the reception been so far? If I were to review this, I’d like to be able to let it sink in for at least a couple of months, but that’s not really how these things work, I suppose.

By the way, I briefly mentioned the soundtrack, but it’s pretty wild. Bold choice as well. It could’ve been more of a synth-soundscape, couple of sad notes, catchy melodies, the works. But this was way better.

Very curious what you’ll come up with next time. If you’re willing to create another game!

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the game a lot. Despite operating on so many similar wavelengths, your experience with this game and subsequent thoughts seem to be relatively oblique to my own—often headed in the same direction, but approached from a different angle and from a different starting point.
Well written and with some interesting phrasing, appropriate for expressing so many interesting thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time.

@Baron_Blubba: thank you!

@Wormwood_Studio: Don’t hold back on my account, elaborate responses to me are like Faygo to a Juggalo.

Though it’s cool if you don’t share whatever you think would be unnecessary.

Some questions, if that’s alright! From what I can tell, one of you developed both the visual and the audible art of this game. The music is quite unlike anything I’ve heard in an adventure game before. Even outside of AGs, it’s quite unusual. This is one of the few things I can come up with that might be in the same sub-genre (or spirit) as this game’s OST. Quite unique! How did the artist come up with the soundtrack? What were the inspirations (musically, or otherwise!), was it composed during, after or maybe even before the rest of the game?