Strangeland sends the nameless stranger Quarant through a nightmarish carnival in search of the golden-haired woman who threw herself down a well. Every resident he meets, from the blind scribe to the furnace numbered 83, turns out to be a fragment of his own mind.
The carnival is a mental landscape of guilt, with the dark thing above killing everything it touches and deactivating the rides. The reveal lands late and hard, as the mirror tells the stranger that the woman is dead and the whole park is an evasion of his own self-loathing.
The gameplay is classic point-and-click, with dialogue trees, a nine-slot inventory, item combining and connected areas to explore. Puzzle chains include forging a beak to open a rat stuffed with coins and decoding the pay phone number 4311013 from a tarot reading.
Death carries no penalty, with the stranger simply respawning at the nearest safe point, a design choice the run found refreshing. Three endings reward the completionist, with the orb ending dissolving the shadow as the good one.
The surreal aesthetic, the joke-telling humour and the recognisable voice cast keep the carnival memorable throughout. The tarot reading that hides the phone number is a standout puzzle, and the mirror’s final monologue is the game’s best writing.
The shooting gallery is nearly impossible until the player finds the control box that slows the targets, and the mouse sensitivity option does nothing. The mirror-shard puzzle barely rotates its pieces, and feeding the teratoma is a tedious repetition.
Overall, the carnival of the mind, the literary writing and the consequence-free deaths made the playthrough fun from the first joke to the final mirror. The frustrating puzzles and the deliberately opaque symbolism are the price of entry, but the journey is worth it.