Strangeland News

-Fixed an issue with an exit in the Turkish translation!

We are honored and delighted to release a new build of Strangeland with full German and Turkish text throughout. This represents a monumental achievement by volunteers who have both the skill of translation and the broad knowledge needed to capture the game’s many references and allusions. We are immensely grateful to Yerel Çeviri for the Turkish translation and Jonas for the German translation.

I would also like to include a short acknowledgment of what these translations mean to me personally, as well as to James Spanos, our coder.

Strangeland owes a great debt to German culture, not only in its direct references to Wagner’s Ring Cycle and German-Norse mythology generally but also from the spiritual and intellectual impact on me from various works of literature written in German: Schiller’s Don Carlos, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Kafka’s entire corpus. The themes of humanism and alienation that run through these works helped shape the philosophical backbone of both Strangeland and Primordia. In my growing up, the wounds of World War II were still raw enough in my parents’ and grandparents’ lives that German works were something of a taboo in my family, and I am grateful to have seen those wounds heal enough that my children and I enjoy the free flow of culture back and forth with Germany.

As for Turkish, I can only say that few countries have taken hold of my soul as Turkey did during the short stay there I had with my wife, many years ago. Strangeland is a palimpsest of meaning on top of meaning, and nowhere has that ever seemed so physically embodied to me as Istanbul: a city rich with life and deep with many cultures. We were welcomed into Turkey with universal hospitality, in every town and city we visited. I close my eyes, and I’m transported back to that magical time. And, of course, no country welcomed our first game, Primordia, with quite such hospitality either: I don’t know how or why, but the game received two glowing reviews in Turkish print magazines and many more online. The Turkish translation also means much to James, the Greek member of our trio. After Primordia was released, James had to serve his mandatory term in the Greek army. But James—like Primordia’s Horatio—is a warrior for peace and friendship, and making this translation succeed was a must for him.

I go on about this because we are obviously in a moment of crisis in the world. Even though our games have a lot to say, we have never tried to make them about “the moment.” That is because in every moment, each of us must struggle to put love before hate, hope before despair, wisdom before folly, and grace before bitterness. In the end, we are small, fragile beings in an ever smaller, ever more fragile world. That world is surrounded by immense darkness and lifelessness, and the work of living is to see the light in each other, so that we do not turn this beautiful miracle of humanity and earth back into void and chaos.

These two translations are a gift to us at Wormwood Studios from generous, volunteer translators. We hope that they are also a gift to many players, so that our little game may provide a little light to others. You have provided much light for us.

The nominees for the 2021 Adventure Game Studio (AGS) Awards are in, and Strangeland has taken home 10 nominations, hitting all the major categories!

• Best Game Created with AGS
  
• Best Writing
  
• Best Gameplay
  
• Best Background Art
  
• Best Character Art
  
• Best Animation
  
• Best Music & Sound
  
• Best Voice Work
  
• Best Programming
  
• Best Puzzles
  

It's wonderful to see the whole team's work recognized. In particular, it's unusual and gratifying for an award to single out coding, an honor James Spanos very much deserves. Of course, awards for gameplay, audio, and even art all reflect the quality of the coding, which is critical to creating a smooth gameplay experience and for the audiovisual effects that make Strangeland so unnerving and alive.

If you're interested in casting a vote, you'll need to register at the AGS forums, which can be a tricky process (the most elaborate anti-bot system this side of the Voight-Kampff test), but you can take do so here.

We are floored by the nominations Strangeland received for the 2021 Aggie Awards, annually handed out by AdventureGamers.com, which I believe is the longest-running major adventure-game-focused website out there.

Strangeland was nominated for Best Traditional Adventure, Best Gameplay, Best Story, Best Art, Best Writing (Drama), Best Voice Acting, and Best Setting (the category that Primordia won in 2012). We are still awaiting the nominees for Best Adventure. There are many more nominees per category than back when Primordia came out, which may account for the larger number of nominations. Whatever the reason, we're very proud and grateful. In particular, it is nice to see nominations in such a wide variety of categories, recognizing the contributions from the whole team.

Back on Strangeland's release, Adventure Gamers described it thusly:

Strangeland is a surrealist, psychologic horror adventure that feels like it was drawn by H.R. Giger, designed by M.C. Escher, and written by Aeschylus. It’s a polished, well-written, well-acted and intriguing interactive nightmare that is easily worth your time—if you can stomach the unrelenting depressive tone and disturbing imagery.

We liked that so much we used it as one of the pull-quotes for Steam!

All the same, the kudos that matter the most to us come from players, whether reviews here (nearing 450!) or emails, and what is particularly nice about the Aggie awards is that the nominations reflect the community's involvement in the voting.

Finally, while the fez-wearing character is a bit much, it does offer an excuse to announce that Strangeland's Turkish fan translation is now complete and in testing!

The German indiegame magazine Welcome to Last Week named Strangeland the year's best point-and-click adventure!

By way of Google Translate, you too can can read what WTLW had to say about Strangeland, which they awarded a 10/10. At taste:

Strangeland is where my dreams come true. Not the dreams where I ride to Hogwarts on a witch's broomstick eating ice cream, but the kind of dreams where I'm confronted with my primal fears, my traumas. I am the stranger in a strange land crouching in the twilight between flesh and machine. ...

Every sentence in Strangeland is in the right place. Playing it is like interpreting a poem. At the same time, it is an ancient image, thickly painted on a canvas, hiding many previous versions. And like a painting, there's more to the pixelated adventure than just looks. The slightly stiff animations are more than offset by the unique organo-mechanical look. Like in a cabinet of curiosities, I don't even know where to look first. The key was attention. Thinking along is rewarded more than in any other adventure. I will meditate on the dialogues many more times and explore the inspirations of Wormwood Studios.

Incidentally, WTLW's mission statement is fantastic, and I only wish I could read German well enough not to have to rely on machine translation:

[T]his indie game magazine is ... called Welcome To Last Week. Because research, intensive work and a sophisticated choice of words just take time. Because chasing after the hottest news is already happening everywhere. Because game journalism can do without rumors, leaks and sensations and deserves intensively researched texts. Because indie games are a wonderful form of expression and art in pop culture. We give them the attention they deserve.

We see ourselves as a culture magazine in the video game sector and not as a pure gaming platform. Barriers should be broken down in our texts. We want to enable everyone interested in art and culture to be able to understand our thoughts and experiences. Where others stop, we dig even deeper. We want to get to the bottom of the various gaming experiences, illuminate interesting topics, go into more detail on things that are easy to overlook or even obvious. We don't write tests according to imposed patterns, because tests are for food processors and vacuum cleaners. We look at the whole work, place it in a cultural, historical, emotional or artistic context and try to understand it. Pick out great idiosyncrasies to show you the cleverness of creative minds. We certainly don't always succeed in this, and by no means every video game experience is suitable for this. Sometimes it's a humorous approach that may reflect what has happened, sometimes it's more emotional. However, we do not claim to just scratch the surface or reproduce text modules.

Naturally, we're biased in favor of anyone who likes Strangeland, but that seems like an excellent approach to writing about games. Such analysis may not offer a quick way to decide whether to buy a game or not, but the writing becomes its own art. As a developer I've learned a lot about how to make games by reading thoughtful dissections of the games that came before ours, and as a player, I've had my experience enriched by reading other's well-written reactions to the games I've loved.

Hopefully with our upcoming German-language translation, we will be able to reach more of WTLW's readership in 2022!