Incline Strangeland - new adventure game from Wormwood Studios

[MRY]

All fair points, and all things I certainly was aware of in making the game. Ultimately, though, the whole point of making my own games, rather than getting paid to write for others, is to tell the stories I need to tell. Sometimes those are hero journeys where you get to beat oppressive AIs in the name of righteousness, but not always. Strangeland isn’t meant to be a “fun” story in that regard.

From a narrative standpoint, I see no reason to think that someone who liked, say, Shardlight or Unavowed, would enjoy it. No reason to think he wouldn’t, but they’re just offering different things.

So these are totally reasonable grounds not play or like the game, but (unlike other criticisms) I don’t really see them as really a shortcoming in our execution of the game, if that makes sense.

 

[VonHoffenHeimer]

I'm imagining that artwork on a pc big box....mmmm

 

[MRY]

When the dust settles we may make a few boxes (empty!) for vanity’s sake.

 

[Atrachasis]

All fair points, and all things I certainly was aware of in making the game. Ultimately, though, the whole point of making my own games, rather than getting paid to write for others, is to tell the stories I need to tell. Sometimes those are hero journeys where you get to beat oppressive AIs in the name of righteousness, but not always. Strangeland isn’t meant to be a “fun” story in that regard.

From a narrative standpoint, I see no reason to think that someone who liked, say, Shardlight or Unavowed, would enjoy it. No reason to think he wouldn’t, but they’re just offering different things.

So these are totally reasonable grounds not play or like the game, but (unlike other criticisms) I don’t really see them as really a shortcoming in our execution of the game, if that makes sense.

It does, a lot, and I suspected so. From what I've seen from Darth Roxor's splendid LP, there probably aren't too many shortcomings in the execution to speak of, and even though this one may not be for me, I am glad that you have that liberty of not honing your tale to maximize your target demographics. That actually heightens, rather than dampens, the anticipation of both your and Wadjet Eye's future offerings.

 

[MRY]

I didn't even know he was playing it! That rascal...

 

[Alpan]

I didn't even know he was playing it! That rascal...

I mean, I suppose this must be literally the only thread you check out these days. LP's right there in Codex Playground, where all LPs are...

EDIT: Ah, you've been there already.

 

[MRY]

Fun interview I did, more about adventure games in general than Strangeland specifically: https://genesistemple.com/the-genesis-temple-podcast-1-mark-yohalem-strangeland-primordia

 

[baud]

I'll be honest, and leave this here as a bit of totally unrepresentative market feedback for Mark: This is one of the very few Wadjet-published games that I feel no incentive to buy at all. This despite the fact that the craftsmanship seems to be as top-notch as ever (although the Giger-esque look is not as original any more as it once was...). Maybe it's just the setting and genre that rubs me the wrong way. I get that it's all highly allegorical and symbolistic and whatnot; perhaps what is rubbing me the wrong way is that, in psychology, such symbolic imagery is highly subjective. But the moment you turn this imagery into a setting for a game with a distinct audiovisual appearance, you are objectivizing the subjective, which is a bit like squaring the circle. It feels like a psychotic setting to explore what is presumably a highly neurotic personality. As a player, I am left stumbling through another person's objectivized head carnival, which I do not enjoy. Am I making any sense?

From my feelings while playing, it's obvious it's happening in someone's head, as in the visuals are a dead giveaway the game doesn't take place in the real world, but unless you go look for what the imagery is standing for, it's not in your face (at least it was not in my face)

 

[MRY]

I find no fault with the morality or logic of your reasoning, I just worry that you're possibly a little bit naive for your willingness to articulate it on the internet while attached to your actual biographical handle.

To me, it's not materially different from when, years ago, I posted this to the Wormwood site saying that we support LPers of our games (when YT was shutting down LPs for copyright infringement). Let's Plays, long plays, and streams probably are infringements, and at least some people who watch them end up not buying the game because they've already gotten a substantial amount of the game's content for free. People should follow the law and respect the work that goes into IP and the wishes of the IP holders, but as to my own creations, I don't get upset at people for getting at the games one way rather than another. Obviously, if someone is pirating or streaming our games for the purpose of harming us, I'd be disappointed and a bit hurt by that attitude, but I'm not sure I've ever seen such an attitude actually carried out. People sometimes posture like that, but if you don't like us or our games, it seems like you're hurting yourself more than us by pirating them!

 

[rashiakas]

It’s a terrible value proposition in terms of hours per dollar. So if your main concern is filling your time, you should pirate SL and then buy something else like Stardew Valley.

so can I buy it directly from you so steam does not get 30% or what

 

[MRY]

To be honest, if you really want to support us, the best way to do it is to buy it on Steam and leave a review. The marginal dollar or so difference from buying through the Humble widget is definitely worth much, much less than the benefits in Steam prominence from feeding its ranking algorithm. My general view is that people should buy it from GOG if they hate Steam's DRM, and otherwise should just buy it wherever it's cheapest. But from our standpoint, pretty sure Steam sales are best.

 

[Latelistener]

I think Primordia didn't even require Steam client to play, which means once you download it it's DRM free. I assume Strangeland is no different?

 

[MRY]

I don't know how Steam works well enough to answer. I thought Steam was always meddling around with stuff. There's certainly nothing about Strangeland that should require Steam to play, so probably however Primordia worked, Strangeland works too?

 

[Alpan]

I think Primordia didn't even require Steam client to play, which means once you download it it's DRM free. I assume Strangeland is no different?

Yes, you should be able to run Strangeland from your installation folder.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Zarniwoop]

Just started playing this and yep, it's definitely strange.

MRY what's up with the cloud saves not working on GOG? At first it was completely disabled, I contacted their support and they enabled it, I thought there was an issue with GOG servers or something. But now I'm getting an error message saying that the files are too large for the 200MB cloud space available. How does a point and click adventure even use 355MB for a single save slot in the first place? That's like X4 territory.

 

[MRY]

The saves are minuscule. I have no idea what’s going on, unless GOG cloud saves do a memory dump rather then using the game’s own save system. Any thoughts Dualnames?

 

[Zarniwoop]

I doubt GOG has their own save system, they usually just make copies of what's in the game's save folder.

Mine has 355MB. Could just be me but it's happened on 2 machines now...

 

[Dualnames]

lol, the saves are 24kb each trust me, GOG must have set it up so that they pool the entire folder [which they shouldn't because the engine creates a 200mb file [which i can't disable, but we don't use in Strangeland]].
I'm gonna contact them.

 

[Dualnames]

You can remove the 001 and 999 files from the folder before syncing em up, but i can't do much apparently GOG doesnt allow for excluding filetypes. And these files get autogenerated by the engine. Essentially your saves would be 25mb for 1000 saves, but instead it's 350+25 whereas the 350 can't be fixed, I'm trying to see if there's a way.

 

[ghostdog]

Finished it, liked it a lot. The writing was very good, the only thing I would cut down were the quotes, too many IMO. The puzzles were logical, within the logic of the setting. I didn't like the fact that the path to the monsters exhibit hall is hidden from view, it took me a while to find it, and I found it by chance. I was stumped for quite a while with the phone-number and the well puzzle, but maybe that's me being slow. It took me about 5h.

Thanks MRY , I enjoyed it, even if it was fucking bleak.

 

[MRY]

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

Inadequately signaled exits are a recurrent issue with Vic’s rooms, but you have to take the bitter with the sweet with an artist of his gifts.

 

[MRY]

New dev diary: "First Thanks, Next Steps"

It gets all weird when I try to copy/paste it, but the gist is:

- Thanks for all the reviews, feedback, etc. Means a lot to us, and helps the game succeed.
- We are undertaking translations into several languages (Hungarian; German; Russian; French; Spanish; Vietnamese; Japanese), but failure rate can be quite high, so don't get your hopes too high.
- We are undertaking ports which take time but which I think are likely to succeed.
- Future projects: Fallen Gods from me, Carbon Flesh from Dualnames, maybe another project from Vic, James, and me together.

 

[agris]

maybe another project from Vic, James, and me together

Primordia prequel sequel confirmed for release in 2030.

 

[MRY]

At some point Vic is just going to make a Primordia sequel without me.