The graphics are very nice and the story is enjoyable. The puzzles, though, are on the mediocre side. They're set up so that you have to solve them in sequence. So, if you're stuck in a puzzle, you're stuck in the entire game. Also, while you can skip animations when moving from a location to the other, you can't do that while interacting with objects. And characters walk veeery slowly in this game. Still about the puzzles, many times you're almost there and the character keep saying it's nonsense, then you make one tiny step and everything makes sense to them as well. Some minimal clue on that regard would have improved the playability a lot. Finally, you surely can't speak of pixel hunting here, but many times you're stuck just because you didn't pick up a random object. There is no highlight of interactable objects (the name appears, but it's not that noticeable and the bounding box are often of "questionable" size) and, being the graphics a mere scale of gray (which is nice for the aesthetics, not so much for the playability), you pass by many things because they don't look like you're supposed to do anything with them. In the end, it's undoubtably a nice game that (in my opinion, at last) markets itself as easy-to-pick but lacks many quality-of-life features to keep its promise. On the other hand, it's not a classic either, so things you would forgive to games like Gabriel Knight and such, here just add up to the frustration.
I got it as a giveaway, so in the end it's not much of a deal, I guess, but apparently you need Fallout 4 to play it. Nonetheless, I believe it should be marked as a DLC or something like that, to make clear this is a mod, not a full game.
The pixelart is great, the user interface feels very old-style, the story is entertaining, the setting is cute, I loved the English accent in all the dialogs... I mean, it doesn't innovate much in the point-and-click genre but so far it checkes all the boxes for it to be stand out from the bunch. I'm definitely looking forward to the full release!
This is another good point & click adventure from Wadjet Eye. The story is interesting and well written, the pixel art is nice, the voice acting is high-quality as usual, the game itself is good. No real issue on that. If you loved the Blackwell adventures, you're gonna like this one for sure. The main issue I have is that it's just more of the same, it doesn't improve on that formula. Also, on the technical side, the user interface is a bit clunky and some puzzles are quite "obtuse", in the sense that, even if you've kind of understood the solution already, the game expects you to perfom a very specific action to advance, and it's not quite clear what you're supposed to do. Otherwise, I have to say the puzzles are quite fair.
I bought this game because Wadjet Eye games are generally very good. This is not. At most, it's mediocre. I could go into details about why I didn't like this and that, but I guess others might disagree with me. It's all quite subjective, after all. The real problem, though, is that Strangeland has a fundamental flaw that I think kind of transcends my personal opinion. You know the groundhog day? The game is structured the same way. You make some progress, then you "die" (to die is part of the story, you can't really avoid it) and respawn at the first location. So you have to walk again to the place where you left, same actions, same cutscenes, over and over again. Moreover, you get to understand what the plot is aiming at quite early, so all the "nonsensical" setting falls flat very soon and you start to skip dialog after dialog becasue you kind of already got the point and for the rest you simply don't care.
The game doesn't start. I've tried it twice and my PC always gets stuck in a black screen. I haven't contacted support about it because it's a game that I got for free and, in my understanding, it's worth next to nothing anyway. Enough for me to give it the lowest rate.
