Strangeland - Hotfix Achievement Patch
James Spanossteam_community_announcementspatchnotes
-Achievements now sync properly between local and remote, ensuring you don't lose any progress.
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Strangeland is finally on the Nintendo Switch!
Way back in January 2019, I suggested to my teammates that we look into porting our games to the Nintendo Switch. By June 2021, just after Strangeland was released, a port seemed “horribly close.” But then, it turned out that many of the amazing effects that James had created for the game—ranging from audio tricks to visual flair to the bespoke instantaneous save system—couldn’t work with the existing porting framework.
As with all game development, that’s when the grueling work kicked in, and it’s where some devs would have quit and chased after something more fun. But it’s not for nothing that James earned a lifetime achievement award in Adventure Game Studio, and his track record for releasing projects is 100%. James doesn’t leave games behind, and Strangeland’s Switch port was no exception to this rule.
So now, after three quarters of a decade, Strangeland is finally coming to the Switch. I’ve found these Nintendo ports quite personally significant because as a kid, I dreamed of making games for my NES. Between Infinity finally releasing on the Game Boy Color and Primordia and Strangeland on the Switch, I feel like that arc of my life has reached its happy end.
Thank you all for your support over the years! We look forward to sharing Fallen Gods with you next!
-Mark
Sometimes it feels like just yesterday that we were making Strangeland (maybe because James and I were actually working on it last week!) and sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago. All of our games are intensely personal: we poured ourselves in Primordia and Fallen Gods no less than into Strangeland. But there was something especially personal about Strangeland, where we didn’t just weave an adventure out of the works and people that had inspired us, but also mourned the loss of those inspirations. I think that was true for each of us on the team; from talking through the many characters he would voice with Abe, I know that he, too, drew from such depths.
Players have talked about Strangeland as a part of their “journey through grief”; they have written to me about playing or thinking about it year after year. They have said it helped them in their darkest days. There aren’t words to say how much that means. For me, the project began with the loss of my grandparents, trying to give a form to the shapeless feelings and thoughts that grew in the hole they left behind. In the end, I felt lighter for having gone through that darkness—especially having gone through it with my friends as we built another game together.
“Together” as an indie developer doesn’t just mean your teammates; it means the players, too. My Aunt Virginia, whose poetry inspired me so much on Primordia, once wrote: “Then, as now, a poem might tell a story, create and transmit a mood, emotion, idea, a private or world view; it can do one, or some, or all of these things. But whatever it does, it must, first engage the reader as a participant in an event. And when this happens, a great poem, like a great love, leaves an ineradicable mark, forever changing the man or woman who experiences it.” Even more than a poem, a game must engage the player as a participant. And for your participation in Strangeland and Primordia, we are deeply grateful. We look forward to sharing more with you in the future.
As the Earth completes another orbit (15 of them since Primordia got underway), we look back happily at all the love our games have gotten from fans and, somewhat more ruefully, at the sweat and effort that went into those games in the past twelve months.
Our foremost effort has been on Fallen Gods, which is nearing completion! (Not a bad time to wishlist it!) The team poured thousands of hours into its development this year, and the additions are too numerous to list. Significantly, we finished the game's hundreds of illustrations, hundreds of events (comprising tens of thousands of nodes), and hours of voice-over. We added tons of new animations, interfaces, sound effects, and other pixel art. Here's a peek at some of the new stuff!
New Backgrounds and Combat Animations
Seed Menu (for replaying recent maps or trying seeds recommended by friends)
Difficulty levels
Zoomable world map
Scoreboard and achievements
Tutorial and integrated pop-up tips
Dynamic ending slides and after-action saga
We still found hundreds of hours to put into our never-ending work on Primordia and Strangeland (both 70% off in the current Steam sale), fielding player questions, patching bugs, keeping the games compatible on modern systems, and working on translations and ports.
Primordia got three patches; Strangeland got two patches and was upgraded to a newer version of Adventure Game Studio. Having ported Primordia to the Switch a few years ago, James has been working ever since on getting Strangeland onto the Switch as well, and now has a working version that's playable start to finish. Strangeland also hit some big milestones as it approaches its five-year anniversary of release: 800 reviews (the best thing you can do to support indie devs is leave reviews!) and 50,000 copies sold. We're also still plugging away on the Spanish translation for Strangeland.
All told, it's been a great 2025, and we're looking forward to an exciting 2026, hopefully with the release of Fallen Gods to kick it off!
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This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Strangeland, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Strangeland statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.
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