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It's a bit of a wincer to see a woman's head slowly sliding into a cross section of two pieces as she says 'help me!', even if it's all in greyscale pixels. Not that Strangeland is going to keep you up at night, but it's got some cool, graphic - or at least graphically weird - bits that take advantage of its form. But the reason that horror keeps going back to the trauma-and-depression-metaphor well is that it is an enduringly effective way to make an audience feel uncomfortable. I'm not smart enough to talk about all the nuances of these kinds of representations I don't know, for example, if anything in Strangeland is particularly crass or offensive. There are several references to a black dog.

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Many conversations and visual metaphors end up being about the self, and self-image, and how to change oneself. Its whole vibe is like an episode of Twilight Zone via an episode of American Horror Story via if Tim Burton got trapped in a secret vore nightmare, and every second inhabitant tells the protagonist he's an idiot loser who makes everything he touches worse. And if you've seen any prestige horror films in the last few years, or even just engaged with any horror tropes before, you'll figure out what Strangeland's deal is in about 30 seconds. You immediately fixate on saving this woman, and set about doing so in a point 'n' click puzzle fashion. It is explained to you - by a raven, a head-in-a-box fortune teller, and a payphone caller who hates you - that she does this repeatedly, because death doesn't work the same here.

As soon as you arrive, you see a woman throw herself down a well inside the welcome tent. It is rendered in lovely pixels that make everything look fleshy, even if the colours are all muted. The 'where', it soon appears, is the titular land, a sort of grimdark carnival floating in a terrible void. In Strangeland you, a man in a half-undone, old-timey straightjacket, wake up with no memory of who, what or where you are.

Strangeland does interesting things with genre tropes, but it's stuffed with as many metaphors as it is great puzzles.

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