About Happy Land:
To any potential players or Amanita devs who maybe see this review, everything I’m about to say is to be taken as a compliment. This game left me so tired. Won’t say any specifics or otherwise spoilers, but the ending left me so tired with its implications and ideas, so buried in thought about the sum total of the whole experience and how it relates to elements of my own life and experience, to an extent that I can’t really say a video game ever has. I can’t stop thinking about it. I just can’t. I cannot get the soundtrack out of my head – particularly the main menu theme. So hauntingly beautiful and melancholy. The visuals in this game can only be described as nightmarish, luckily for this game’s plot and theming. Always beautiful, sometimes silly, and absolutely terrifying. The length of the game renders the whole experience something like an interactive single-sitting movie. Play this game if you want something different. What an absolute masterpiece. I rate this game 5 easily-disturbed heart-people out of 5 LSD child-sacrifice deerman-rituals. Holy crap, Amanita.It might be a me-problem, but the entirety of this game fell flat for me. From the point of view as point-and-click-adventure it got rather boring and tedious extremely quickly, and the true horror was dragging the little whiny nitwit around while thinking “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” on a loop. From a visual standpoint the game is nifty… for five minutes. The “psychidelic nightmare” theme gets old extremely quickly and after two scenes/levels it boils down to the following: Something’s head is going to come off and/or somewhere turns out a bleeding smile and/or something’s limbs are going to stretch to unreasonable length.
