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Incline Strangeland - new adventure game from Wormwood Studios
- Thread starter MRY
- Start date
Why on earth?
There are a lot of people with Switches that just indiscriminately buy anything they see. The Nintendo EStore is just as bloated up with shovelware as Steam at this point.
They may look like humanoids...
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I'm torn on whether to post this as a Steam update. Would value some additional opinions. Right now one person whose advice I really trust thinks it may turn people away, but Vic thinks we should post it, and obviously I liked it enough to write it, but I'm a bit uncertain:
My specific concern is:
In Strangeland you can die, but it doesn't end the game. You can die because it is, after all, a game about death -- the final death that means a permanent division, and the little deaths that are a series of erosive subtractions. Its nightmarish, carnival setting is a place of peril, and the LucasArts convention of the hero always stopping just short of his doom would defang the danger and undermine the horror. So you can die. But death doesn't mean "game over" because, thematically, death is no escape for the protagonist. And, of course, most players today find the old Sierra-style slaughterhouses unenjoyable and even absurd.
I've sometimes wondered whether, frustrating as they could be, the frequent deaths in Sierra's adventures might nevertheless have been the right approach. The King's Quest games are fairy tale pastiches, and, in their origin, fairy tales are warnings about the deadliness of the world. The deaths range from the pedestrian (the starving poverty of Hansel and Gretel) to the macabre (often via cruel step-parents) to the draconian (straying from a prescribed path or ritual). Overall, the tales tell of a world that is -- as the Haida adage runs -- "as sharp as a knife."
In a sense, children -- like heroes of a LucasArts adventure -- are immortal. What does it mean to be immortal, after all? Before Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge, there was no death, or fear of death, in the Garden. But Adam had not, after all, eaten of the Tree of Life -- it was precisely to stop mankind from attaining both knowledge and eternal life that Adam and Eve had to be driven out, and the way back guarded by a flaming sword and cherubim -- "lest he take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." And Adam died in the end. If immortal means never-to-die, then Adam was never immortal. He was just alive and unaware that death with infinite devices was plotting his demise.
So it often is with children, and hence perhaps the folk wisdom that such children require instruction in their mortality. But the fairytales I was told described a world of rounded corners and benevolent spirits. I enjoyed the edenic experience of being alive, with death's shadow only behind me, where I couldn't see it. Then came a year of lightning bolts, one literal, others not, and in the brightness I could see there were shadows everywhere.
When I was 11, a boy was killby a lightning bolt on my school's sports field. We had been thinking of going to the game that day. Our school's rival was visiting, and school spirit called for attendance. But the lacrosse coach had been my brother's teacher the year before and had bullied him relentlessly -- my brother was a rangey brawler who couldn't be bullied by his classmates but didn't entirely fit in at the school, and so the teacher had felt compelled to throw his own weight behind the students who tried to haze him. That was reason enough to skip the game.
At home my brother, mom, and I watched the sky turn pitch black, the darkest clouds I'd seen in years, and then the sky opened up with torrential rain. Back at the school, students and parents fled for shelter beneath the broad boughs of a huge old tree. At home, we heard a tremendous thunderclap, enough to shake the window panes, and there was a blinding flash of light.
The tree drew the lightning. One parent described a boy who turned first blue, then white; the school colors, actually.
Lightning apparently tends to deliver the most voltage to the head. The body can burn from the inside out. A classmate of mine lost his vision, for a week. All around his eyes when he came back to school the skin was blackened, like goth mascara. He tried to swagger, but he still seemed terribly afraid; and even at that school where bullying had official imprimatur, everyone let him be. The boy who had died was a student at the other school; it was like we had seen him only as long as a flash of lightning; he appeared, blazed bright, and lingered only as an afterimage.
Years ago, reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin, I was surprised to learn just what a transformation he had wrought on the world by inventing the lightning rod. Like many great inventions, the lightning rod has made itself unremarkable through success. But lightning was once a scourge of civilization; a great leveler of man's aspirations. Not for nothing was it lightning bolts that the Cyclopes wrought for Zeus. But, in a feat to outdo Prometheus, Franklin not only took the secret of electricity, but also stole the sting from the god's bolts. Almost.
Strangeland's horror lies in that inexorable "almost." The Norse told the essential story of parenthood. Frigg dreams of her son Balder's death, and criss-crosses the world, negotiating with almost all its animal, plant, and mineral inhabitants until they promise not to kill Balder. Out of everything on earth, she misses only the mistletoe. But in the end, that is enough for his undoing. We all bargain like this on behalf of our loved ones, even if we lack Frigg's sorcery to win the world's actual acquiescence. But even if we could, there is always that "almost."
In Strangeland, the protagonist is consumed by the crushing powerlessness of that "almost." There is no escaping death or life in the uncanny carnival.
I've sometimes wondered whether, frustrating as they could be, the frequent deaths in Sierra's adventures might nevertheless have been the right approach. The King's Quest games are fairy tale pastiches, and, in their origin, fairy tales are warnings about the deadliness of the world. The deaths range from the pedestrian (the starving poverty of Hansel and Gretel) to the macabre (often via cruel step-parents) to the draconian (straying from a prescribed path or ritual). Overall, the tales tell of a world that is -- as the Haida adage runs -- "as sharp as a knife."
In a sense, children -- like heroes of a LucasArts adventure -- are immortal. What does it mean to be immortal, after all? Before Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge, there was no death, or fear of death, in the Garden. But Adam had not, after all, eaten of the Tree of Life -- it was precisely to stop mankind from attaining both knowledge and eternal life that Adam and Eve had to be driven out, and the way back guarded by a flaming sword and cherubim -- "lest he take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." And Adam died in the end. If immortal means never-to-die, then Adam was never immortal. He was just alive and unaware that death with infinite devices was plotting his demise.
So it often is with children, and hence perhaps the folk wisdom that such children require instruction in their mortality. But the fairytales I was told described a world of rounded corners and benevolent spirits. I enjoyed the edenic experience of being alive, with death's shadow only behind me, where I couldn't see it. Then came a year of lightning bolts, one literal, others not, and in the brightness I could see there were shadows everywhere.
When I was 11, a boy was killby a lightning bolt on my school's sports field. We had been thinking of going to the game that day. Our school's rival was visiting, and school spirit called for attendance. But the lacrosse coach had been my brother's teacher the year before and had bullied him relentlessly -- my brother was a rangey brawler who couldn't be bullied by his classmates but didn't entirely fit in at the school, and so the teacher had felt compelled to throw his own weight behind the students who tried to haze him. That was reason enough to skip the game.
At home my brother, mom, and I watched the sky turn pitch black, the darkest clouds I'd seen in years, and then the sky opened up with torrential rain. Back at the school, students and parents fled for shelter beneath the broad boughs of a huge old tree. At home, we heard a tremendous thunderclap, enough to shake the window panes, and there was a blinding flash of light.
The tree drew the lightning. One parent described a boy who turned first blue, then white; the school colors, actually.
Lightning apparently tends to deliver the most voltage to the head. The body can burn from the inside out. A classmate of mine lost his vision, for a week. All around his eyes when he came back to school the skin was blackened, like goth mascara. He tried to swagger, but he still seemed terribly afraid; and even at that school where bullying had official imprimatur, everyone let him be. The boy who had died was a student at the other school; it was like we had seen him only as long as a flash of lightning; he appeared, blazed bright, and lingered only as an afterimage.
Years ago, reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin, I was surprised to learn just what a transformation he had wrought on the world by inventing the lightning rod. Like many great inventions, the lightning rod has made itself unremarkable through success. But lightning was once a scourge of civilization; a great leveler of man's aspirations. Not for nothing was it lightning bolts that the Cyclopes wrought for Zeus. But, in a feat to outdo Prometheus, Franklin not only took the secret of electricity, but also stole the sting from the god's bolts. Almost.
Strangeland's horror lies in that inexorable "almost." The Norse told the essential story of parenthood. Frigg dreams of her son Balder's death, and criss-crosses the world, negotiating with almost all its animal, plant, and mineral inhabitants until they promise not to kill Balder. Out of everything on earth, she misses only the mistletoe. But in the end, that is enough for his undoing. We all bargain like this on behalf of our loved ones, even if we lack Frigg's sorcery to win the world's actual acquiescence. But even if we could, there is always that "almost."
In Strangeland, the protagonist is consumed by the crushing powerlessness of that "almost." There is no escaping death or life in the uncanny carnival.
As grim as Strangeland is, it certainly doesn't feature anything as horrible as a child being killed by lightning, and some number of potential customers may have a hard line against games/stories that put children in harm's way (to some extent I have that line!), so losing those customers would be unfortunate, since they might enjoy the game nevertheless.
V_K
Arcane
Quite frankly, it's not just that it's macabre, but also (and probably more so) that the bulk of it is very, very tangentially related to the game itself. Seems more fitting for a developer commentary or a postmortem or something, not for PR material.
Like, the questions of whether it will lose you any customers remains open, but it certainly won't gain you any.
Like, the questions of whether it will lose you any customers remains open, but it certainly won't gain you any.
Morpheus Kitami
Liturgist
- Joined
- May 14, 2020
- Messages
- 2,669
It feels a little like you're using the death of a child you barely knew as a way of promoting your game, which is a bit exploitative. I didn't find my current opinion on the game or you changed, but if it was the first thing I saw from you, I'd assume you for some kind of sociopath. I'd definitely rework it, but find some way to keep the first three paragraphs and maybe the Norse bit.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Well, these are more than sufficient reasons not to post it. 
I'll file it away for another time, and go with one of the more on-point and less macabre updates.
I'll file it away for another time, and go with one of the more on-point and less macabre updates.
I think it could have been posted, but perhaps without most of the middle parts, which don't have much to do with the game.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I mean, it depends on what it means to relate to the game; from an inspiration standpoint it does relate.
But really, it's easy enough to just post something else. I'll probably do this piece on puzzles, which is largely stuff I've said in other threads about adventure games here (and which also features an anecdote from around the same age as the lightning bolt!):
The Power of Puzzles
An adventure game mixes story and puzzles. There a puzzle games that don't have stories, and interactive stories that don't have puzzles, and such games can be masterful and beloved. But they aren't adventure games.
Puzzles in adventures have gotten something of a bad rap over the years, in part because they are seen as obstructing the story. This image of adventure games is one in which they are story segments (dialogues and cutscenes) and puzzle segments (exploring, collecting and combining items, solving riddles, cracking codes, etc.), and they trade off in sequence. If the story is engaging and the puzzles are frustrating, this is a little bit like the experience of web browsing where before you can read the article you're looking for, you first have to prove you're not a robot by clicking on stoplights or parsing a hard-to-read CAPTCHA, or like playing some "free" mobile game in which interactive advertisements routinely interrupt your experience.
But in an ideal adventure game, puzzles and stories are not separate segments at all; they are marbled or melded -- the puzzles reveal both the setting and the protagonist to the player. Of each puzzle, you can say: "Because such-and-such is true of this setting, this puzzle is here." And of each solution, you can say: "Because the protagonist has this quality, he can overcome the puzzle this way." Unavailable solutions can also reveal the protagonist, the way that negative space can reveal a subject's form: "Because the protagonist has this quality (or lacks that quality), he cannot overcome the puzzle that way."
If nothing else, an adventure game story should be a story about a protagonist who solves puzzles -- otherwise, there will be an inevitable incongruity ("ludonarrative dissonance") between what the player is being told about his character (say, a hard-bitten solider) and what the game is actually revealing about the character (that he scavenges garbage, serves as a gofer for strangers, and favors eccentric, indirect solutions).
In Primordia, our protagonist was a scavenger robot aspiring to pacifism, and the world was a crumbling dystopia. Horatio viewed any salvageable piece of machinery as worth saving because his survival depended on cobbling those pieces together into his home, his companion, and his means of escape. The world's treasures were locked away because anything not locked away had long since been plundered or destroyed; the world's inhabitants were eccentric, reclusive, and wary of strangers because a post-apocalyptic world is not conducive to normalcy or trust. While some of Primordia's puzzles are failures -- violating the consistency of the world or its characters for the sake of presenting the player another obstacle -- I think by and large we did a good job of revealing Horatio and his environment through the gameplay and not merely through exposition.
Strangeland is a psychological horror game. The obstacles the Stranger faces are expressions of fear, regret, and remorse. As I mentioned in a prior post, the game's genesis was the death of my grandparents -- in particular, processing the way my engineer grandfather had tried to "solve" the puzzle of my grandmother's dementia. The Stranger's attempts to solve the carnival's puzzles reflect that same desperate belief that tragedy is a riddle with an answer, that grief is a cage to be escaped with the right key. The unnatural obstacles in the game can be solved by means that express both naivety and guilt: memory, pain, and metamorphosis are the means the Stranger will use to advance, though those methods will be embodied in particular tools (a dagger; a noose; a note; etc.) with symbolic significance.
Most of what the player will learn about the Stranger and Strangeland (and about the underlying tragedy that is the impetus for this nightmare) is revealed through the puzzles and their solutions. Because the puzzles generally have multiple solutions, the player's course through the game will not only reveal but define the Stranger in subtle ways.
If adventure game puzzles only conveyed the game's story, that would be enough. But I firmly believe that the puzzles have a second great significance: the moment of kinship between player and designer, and between one player and another, that comes from solving puzzles.
It is customary to praise sensible puzzles as "logical" and to criticize inscrutable puzzles as featuring "moon logic." I think this is a bit off. Very few puzzles adhere to formal logic. When we say a puzzle is logical, what we mean is that we understood the rules that governed it, and were able to figure out how to employ those rules to solve it. That means puzzles are really about communication: the designer is speaking to the player (through visual cues, quips, failure messages, etc.). That requires a shared language. But even a shared language doesn't ensure communication -- as any number of spats attest.
As a kid growing up in Washington, D.C., we had a lot of international classmates whose parents worked at the various embassies. We became good friends with an Australian family, whose three sons were particularly bright. But one spelling test, the youngest missed what the teacher felt was an obvious word: he had, inexplicably written "urb" in lieu of "herb." The teacher demanded an explanation. "I thought it was some kind of slang for a city," he answered. The teacher wrote the correct spelling on the blackboard. "But that's herb!" Davie protested, pronouncing the H.
So too with puzzle "logic." Every designer has his or her own dialect and accent, not to mention idioms and tics. Every player has the same. Even when we share a language, even when we've learned that language from the same canonical works, we all speak it in our own way.
Part of game development is figuring out how to account for this. We've had a months-long iterative dialogue with dozens of testers, broadening the ways we communicate to the player and expanding the number of possible solutions and the means by which the player can be nudged along. But still! The designer asks: "I'm thinking of an animal that is gray, has big ears, and a short tail; it lives in dry climates and can move at over 20 miles an hour." The player answers: "A jackrabbit!" And the poor elephant hangs his head.
For all these potential miscommunications, however, there is the sublime moment when the player and designer at last develop a common tongue. The player reads the game's cues in the manner the developer intended; the game parses the player's inputs in the way the player intended; and suddenly, "moon logic" gives way to a moon landing. We have crossed that gulf between two minds and discovered common ground. We are understood!
That eureka moment has always been what drew me to adventure games as a player: the feeling of an earned kinship with the designer and other players alike. And it matters even more to me as a designer. As I've said before, the core value that I hope to convey in the games I design is humanism, and part of the humanistic project is building bridges. More than any other success, the most gratifying part of game development is when we forge a connection with a player, whether through the game's themes, its art, or its puzzles. And the very best connections combine all of that: the puzzle that expresses the game's theme, solved in a manner that reveals the protagonist's character, and understood by the player because we've achieved a common language. In that moment, there is a unity between player, designer, and character, one that is peculiar to the enduring genre of adventure games.
An adventure game mixes story and puzzles. There a puzzle games that don't have stories, and interactive stories that don't have puzzles, and such games can be masterful and beloved. But they aren't adventure games.
Puzzles in adventures have gotten something of a bad rap over the years, in part because they are seen as obstructing the story. This image of adventure games is one in which they are story segments (dialogues and cutscenes) and puzzle segments (exploring, collecting and combining items, solving riddles, cracking codes, etc.), and they trade off in sequence. If the story is engaging and the puzzles are frustrating, this is a little bit like the experience of web browsing where before you can read the article you're looking for, you first have to prove you're not a robot by clicking on stoplights or parsing a hard-to-read CAPTCHA, or like playing some "free" mobile game in which interactive advertisements routinely interrupt your experience.
But in an ideal adventure game, puzzles and stories are not separate segments at all; they are marbled or melded -- the puzzles reveal both the setting and the protagonist to the player. Of each puzzle, you can say: "Because such-and-such is true of this setting, this puzzle is here." And of each solution, you can say: "Because the protagonist has this quality, he can overcome the puzzle this way." Unavailable solutions can also reveal the protagonist, the way that negative space can reveal a subject's form: "Because the protagonist has this quality (or lacks that quality), he cannot overcome the puzzle that way."
If nothing else, an adventure game story should be a story about a protagonist who solves puzzles -- otherwise, there will be an inevitable incongruity ("ludonarrative dissonance") between what the player is being told about his character (say, a hard-bitten solider) and what the game is actually revealing about the character (that he scavenges garbage, serves as a gofer for strangers, and favors eccentric, indirect solutions).
In Primordia, our protagonist was a scavenger robot aspiring to pacifism, and the world was a crumbling dystopia. Horatio viewed any salvageable piece of machinery as worth saving because his survival depended on cobbling those pieces together into his home, his companion, and his means of escape. The world's treasures were locked away because anything not locked away had long since been plundered or destroyed; the world's inhabitants were eccentric, reclusive, and wary of strangers because a post-apocalyptic world is not conducive to normalcy or trust. While some of Primordia's puzzles are failures -- violating the consistency of the world or its characters for the sake of presenting the player another obstacle -- I think by and large we did a good job of revealing Horatio and his environment through the gameplay and not merely through exposition.
Strangeland is a psychological horror game. The obstacles the Stranger faces are expressions of fear, regret, and remorse. As I mentioned in a prior post, the game's genesis was the death of my grandparents -- in particular, processing the way my engineer grandfather had tried to "solve" the puzzle of my grandmother's dementia. The Stranger's attempts to solve the carnival's puzzles reflect that same desperate belief that tragedy is a riddle with an answer, that grief is a cage to be escaped with the right key. The unnatural obstacles in the game can be solved by means that express both naivety and guilt: memory, pain, and metamorphosis are the means the Stranger will use to advance, though those methods will be embodied in particular tools (a dagger; a noose; a note; etc.) with symbolic significance.
Most of what the player will learn about the Stranger and Strangeland (and about the underlying tragedy that is the impetus for this nightmare) is revealed through the puzzles and their solutions. Because the puzzles generally have multiple solutions, the player's course through the game will not only reveal but define the Stranger in subtle ways.
If adventure game puzzles only conveyed the game's story, that would be enough. But I firmly believe that the puzzles have a second great significance: the moment of kinship between player and designer, and between one player and another, that comes from solving puzzles.
It is customary to praise sensible puzzles as "logical" and to criticize inscrutable puzzles as featuring "moon logic." I think this is a bit off. Very few puzzles adhere to formal logic. When we say a puzzle is logical, what we mean is that we understood the rules that governed it, and were able to figure out how to employ those rules to solve it. That means puzzles are really about communication: the designer is speaking to the player (through visual cues, quips, failure messages, etc.). That requires a shared language. But even a shared language doesn't ensure communication -- as any number of spats attest.
As a kid growing up in Washington, D.C., we had a lot of international classmates whose parents worked at the various embassies. We became good friends with an Australian family, whose three sons were particularly bright. But one spelling test, the youngest missed what the teacher felt was an obvious word: he had, inexplicably written "urb" in lieu of "herb." The teacher demanded an explanation. "I thought it was some kind of slang for a city," he answered. The teacher wrote the correct spelling on the blackboard. "But that's herb!" Davie protested, pronouncing the H.
So too with puzzle "logic." Every designer has his or her own dialect and accent, not to mention idioms and tics. Every player has the same. Even when we share a language, even when we've learned that language from the same canonical works, we all speak it in our own way.
Part of game development is figuring out how to account for this. We've had a months-long iterative dialogue with dozens of testers, broadening the ways we communicate to the player and expanding the number of possible solutions and the means by which the player can be nudged along. But still! The designer asks: "I'm thinking of an animal that is gray, has big ears, and a short tail; it lives in dry climates and can move at over 20 miles an hour." The player answers: "A jackrabbit!" And the poor elephant hangs his head.
For all these potential miscommunications, however, there is the sublime moment when the player and designer at last develop a common tongue. The player reads the game's cues in the manner the developer intended; the game parses the player's inputs in the way the player intended; and suddenly, "moon logic" gives way to a moon landing. We have crossed that gulf between two minds and discovered common ground. We are understood!
That eureka moment has always been what drew me to adventure games as a player: the feeling of an earned kinship with the designer and other players alike. And it matters even more to me as a designer. As I've said before, the core value that I hope to convey in the games I design is humanism, and part of the humanistic project is building bridges. More than any other success, the most gratifying part of game development is when we forge a connection with a player, whether through the game's themes, its art, or its puzzles. And the very best connections combine all of that: the puzzle that expresses the game's theme, solved in a manner that reveals the protagonist's character, and understood by the player because we've achieved a common language. In that moment, there is a unity between player, designer, and character, one that is peculiar to the enduring genre of adventure games.
lightbane
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
- Messages
- 10,545
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2018
- Messages
- 1,340
It's a perfectly fine post for a personal blog or the official game blog (I don't know if one exists), not so for Steam or any other storefront. For those I suspect you want to dispense with the philosophy. It's not that "nobody cares" or anything like that, but the transactional nature of these platforms (reflected even in the content of the Steam-hosted discussion forums for games) make this kind of blog post a poor fit. Hawk the goods, not the story.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
That seems reasonable. You're right, that it's more a commentary than a preview of some game feature. I guess the marketing notion was that there might be some benefit in a post that, like the game itself, connects a theme (death), symbols (e.g., mythological and Biblical elements, lightning), gameplay (the inclusion of death but without a game-over screen). If people enjoy the tone of the post, they'll probably enjoy the game.
But the concern that it seems exploitative, and the general consensus that it would not add any appeal to the game page, are enough to merit leaving it out!
But the concern that it seems exploitative, and the general consensus that it would not add any appeal to the game page, are enough to merit leaving it out!
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2018
- Messages
- 1,340
I don't really agree with the exploitation bit. Keep in mind, you can still post the thing on the personal blog, then link to it in a Steam post that contains more "mechanical" items such as a release date or localization plans etc. That context switch itself will be enough for most people to place it in a different mental state.
I don’t think it reads as exploitative at all, and I think it’s definitely interesting, but I agree it does nothing to sell the game; a dev commentary would be the perfect place for it.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Woohoo! Approved by GOG! I'll ask WEG if I can post the GOG assessment -- if only our players feel the same, it will be a mission accomplished.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Also, we could probably use a couple more beta testers if anyone has time/interest.
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2004
- Messages
- 6,925
MRY
Wormwood Studios
The secret is a lack of success.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Release date announced: May 25. Trailer here:
ValeVelKal
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2011
- Messages
- 1,606
MRY
Wormwood Studios
You don't know the half of it.
)
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