It is magical, incredible game. I wish we have more games from creator of Primordia.
As
bertram_tung notes, Strangeland is very nearly done (minus VO). I don't really know how to appraise it. I think in various ways, it vastly exceeds Primordia -- much better art, much better coding (something that is easy to overlook in an adventure game, but there's so much that's awesome under the hood of SL), better quality control overall, more openness, possibly better puzzles (though I still think that the divisive "find Memorious in the kiosk" puzzle is the best I'll ever come up with). I think the writing is more sophisticated, though not sure it's better.
The problem is that Strangeland has a fundamentally different structure than Primordia. Primordia is an adventure story. It's a somewhat subversive adventure story, since it's a revenge plot in which the underlying character arc is that the protagonist is trying to go from being a destroyer to a creator (Gran Torino had a pretty strong influence), so you have a protagonist who is somewhat at odds with the player. But, basically, it's a pretty standard post-apocalyptic plot of surviving a harsh journey, defeating a warlord, recovering a McGuffin, and making a utopia. And it has the typical PA fun of uncovering the lost civilization, the "lol, the survivors don't even know what the old world was" dramatic irony, etc. I think we glossed all of that in a pretty sophisticated way for a video game, but ultimately it had an inherent structure that is likely to please.
Strangeland, by contrast, is an internal story, more like a dream than an adventure. You don't have a journey, you don't
really have an antagonist. Because it's a dream (or a metaphor), the significance of your actions is diminished. Everyone has succeeded and failed in dreams; the thrill or despair lasts only a few minutes after waking up. There are mysteries to unravel, but those mysteries are largely a matter of dream interpretation, rather than a secret history. And the protagonist is even less satisfying than Horatio -- Horatio may have only wanted to stay home and turn the lights back on, but at least he had concrete feelings and goals. Strangeland's protagonist drifts along because, again, our dreams are typically not about
us but about what is happening around or to us.
For a small competition game, this all would've been fine. I'm less sure for a full-length game. To me, the protagonist's arc is an interesting one, the mysteries are interesting. But that's because the game's central question is a personal one to me. Whether it will resonate with (or even make sense to) anyone other than me, I don't know. The testers seem to like it, but they're of course predisposed to being nice to me. But I don't think it's a sure thing that if you liked Primordia, you'll like Strangeland.