The German indiegame magazine Welcome to Last Week named Strangeland the year's best point-and-click adventure!
By way of Google Translate, you too can can read what WTLW had to say about Strangeland, which they awarded a 10/10. At taste:
Strangeland is where my dreams come true. Not the dreams where I ride to Hogwarts on a witch's broomstick eating ice cream, but the kind of dreams where I'm confronted with my primal fears, my traumas. I am the stranger in a strange land crouching in the twilight between flesh and machine. ... Every sentence in Strangeland is in the right place. Playing it is like interpreting a poem. At the same time, it is an ancient image, thickly painted on a canvas, hiding many previous versions. And like a painting, there's more to the pixelated adventure than just looks. The slightly stiff animations are more than offset by the unique organo-mechanical look. Like in a cabinet of curiosities, I don't even know where to look first. The key was attention. Thinking along is rewarded more than in any other adventure. I will meditate on the dialogues many more times and explore the inspirations of Wormwood Studios.
Incidentally, WTLW's mission statement is fantastic, and I only wish I could read German well enough not to have to rely on machine translation:
[T]his indie game magazine is ... called Welcome To Last Week. Because research, intensive work and a sophisticated choice of words just take time. Because chasing after the hottest news is already happening everywhere. Because game journalism can do without rumors, leaks and sensations and deserves intensively researched texts. Because indie games are a wonderful form of expression and art in pop culture. We give them the attention they deserve. We see ourselves as a culture magazine in the video game sector and not as a pure gaming platform. Barriers should be broken down in our texts. We want to enable everyone interested in art and culture to be able to understand our thoughts and experiences. Where others stop, we dig even deeper. We want to get to the bottom of the various gaming experiences, illuminate interesting topics, go into more detail on things that are easy to overlook or even obvious. We don't write tests according to imposed patterns, because tests are for food processors and vacuum cleaners. We look at the whole work, place it in a cultural, historical, emotional or artistic context and try to understand it. Pick out great idiosyncrasies to show you the cleverness of creative minds. We certainly don't always succeed in this, and by no means every video game experience is suitable for this. Sometimes it's a humorous approach that may reflect what has happened, sometimes it's more emotional. However, we do not claim to just scratch the surface or reproduce text modules.
Naturally, we're biased in favor of anyone who likes Strangeland, but that seems like an excellent approach to writing about games. Such analysis may not offer a quick way to decide whether to buy a game or not, but the writing becomes its own art. As a developer I've learned a lot about how to make games by reading thoughtful dissections of the games that came before ours, and as a player, I've had my experience enriched by reading other's well-written reactions to the games I've loved.
Hopefully with our upcoming German-language translation, we will be able to reach more of WTLW's readership in 2022!