Hadean Lands

This is an exemplary model for what interactive fiction should be. I gladly paid for the DLC (which does nothing) to support the author. I don't want to give away anything, but I will say the core mechanic is alchemy, and the game is largely about experimenting to modify alchemical recipes in novel ways to overcome obstacles. It's a very flexible text adventure, and it rewards clever forethought rather than random guessing. This is the sort of game that works best when you decide to put it down for a while and think about the puzzles to brainstorm ideas before returning. It's a game you play even more when you aren't playing it, in other words. There are no dead-ends (you never need to save or full-reset, though you can), there is a comprehensive library of facts and an interface to access them easily (also a map interface), and if you need to find an item you've seen before you can have the character go there by memory so repeating steps is not very burdensome. The game is difficult, but it can be reasoned through. There are things you can do in the game which are complex but do not advance you toward the goal, which is interesting. I beat the game without any hints, but I'm very good at this sort of thing. I don't remember how long it took. Steam says almost 70 hours, but I left the game up overnight more than once as well as when I was at work. It probably took me between six and twelve hours (of keyboard play, not counting the rumination), but that's just a guess. The story is a little far on the cryptic side, and it seems like the game could have gone a little further than it did, but these are hardly tarnishes on such a gem. I'm presently working on a piece of interactive fanfiction that was inspired by this game and uses a similar approach. You know a game is good when it forces you to make another game. Thank you for making this game. <3

A great but difficult modern interactive fiction. (Yes, that's the games we used to call text adventures back in the eighties, in the high times of Incofom.) You enter text, the game describes what happens. In Hadean Lands, you start as a apprentice alchemist on a starship, and of course, something has gone horribly wrong. So you try to work your way through many obstacles, having to learn all those rituals quickly. There's two optional conveniance features, a graphical map and a journal for the many facts and rituals you will learn. Do yourself a favor and issue the command "COMMANDS" early when playing. Hadean Lands has some special mechanics and means to cope with them; you should know about these. Hadean Lands worked flawlessly on Linux. The author has fixed a problem lately that some people have had on Linux.

This is a game about repetition that manages to avoid being repetitive. Solving a puzzle once allows you to perform the same task easily in the future as part of a single command. If you want to go somewhere you've been to before, it doesnt matter how complicated the trip is or how many puzzles are in your way. You can say "go to <room>", and the game will do it, using your own solutions to the puzzles along the way. It can also remember item locations and various bits of world information for you. In other words, Hadean Lands manages to avoid all of the things that usually bother me about text adventures. I have very much enjoyed my time with it. (one warning, though: dont quit using the "quit" command. that actually resets your save. Just close the game out and it will pick up where you left off.)

I love adventure games. I haven't played a text adventure since the early days, though, so I thought I'd give this a try. I can't make heads or tails of it. It's far too confusing. Simple commands that used to always work in text adventures (like "put" ) result in responses that tell me they're not detailed enough or some such. There is so much to remember right at the start that you can't see everything on-screen, that you just get lost. I'm really disappointed this game cost so much and offers so little support for new players. Why are there different commands for "look" and "examine", and why doesn't "put" work? It's maddening for people coming from old text adventures. Gave up after 20 minutes.

The puzzles are great. The story is a bit dissapointing. This is a masterwork of interactive fiction. It took me about fifteen hours to beat it, with only a handful of hints. (mostly because I'd missed a piece of description somewhere, and didn't feel like wandering around examining *everything* again.) There were only one or two 'ye can not get ye flask' moments; the nuances of how the players attention was directed was, for the most part, very well done. The 'repeat anything' mechanic is, frankly, amazing, and the sort of feature an entire IF parser could be built around. The world is exceedingly well-realized, and the puzzles are brilliantly designed. All in all, this was a unique and interesting experience, that I'll look back on fondly... as a puzzle game. My biggest problem with this is, in fact, the 'fiction' part of 'interactive fiction'. The story was... eeeeehhhh. I dunno. Maybe I'm weird for wanting something like 'closure' and/or 'denouement' in my narratives, or thinking that trying to tell a story through dribs and drabs of half-connected hints is a bit frustrating for the reader. Suffice to say, this story felt more than a little pointless, and rather was a rather large let-down for me upon reaching the end. Maybe I wouldn't have been so dissapointed if the rest of the game hadn't been so great...? I dunno. If you like puzzles, (and since that's most of the game, I do recommend it for that,) play this for sure. If you like fuzzy 'bring-your-own-interpretation' litfic, you might even enjoy the story. But if you're expecting a narrative that's as concretely tangible as the atmosphere, execution, and puzzles... you may find yourself dissapointed.

Manages to capture the feel of an old-school puzzle-heavy text adventure with out replicating the annoying parts. In less capable hands, this game could have become extremely tedious, but there are lots of nice little features that keep it from getting too repetitive. The big puzzles of the game are all about learning the details of a complex system, and it's a joy to figure them out.

First off - I very much enjoyed this game, and thought it was well worth the money. If you like interactive fiction, you should definitely buy it and play it. Pros: [list] [*] Very well written - evocative descriptions. [*] Zero instances of 'guess the verb'. No puzzle succeeded/failed on obscure words. [*] An extraordinarly helpful parser, which remembers item locations for you(once encountered), as well as how to perform various chains of actions(if you must repeat them), removing the tediousness of having to type long sequences of commands again and again (including 'go to <location>', if location was previously discovered) [*]With one exception, no puzzle required "kitchen sink" testing of everything possible. If I was trying kitchen sink stuff, it's because I was missing something more obvious. (I tried a lot of kitchen sink solutions, but when I did realize the proper solution I felt silly for not having thought of it earlier). If you're stuck, take a break, think about it, come back to it. [*]NO "WALKING DEAD" SCENARIOS. You cannot get yourself stuck in a way where you can't complete the game. When one way occurred to me to try, I saw how the author had planned around it, and I'm thoroughly convinced you can't get your playthrough stuck. [/list] Cons: [list] [*]There's one key puzzle in the game whose solution requires you to try something you've been taught not to try, and is compounded by what I felt was an unfortunately ambiguous error message if you're near the solution but not quite right. Note that this is the only puzzle I found to be this way. [/list]

An excellent IF puzzle game that really works to make IF easier to play, and gives you a complex set of alchemy to slowly uncover and learn.

Easily the best IF game I've ever played. It's delightful. The parser works. Little time is wasted when recreating items. The game fast-travels. We are equipped with a functional and handy map and journal. This game respects the player's intelligence and the player's time.

Don't get me wrong, I really want to recommend this game. I know Andrew Plotkin's IF work for a long time. But when the text says 'work assignment' is among my inventory, I pretty much expect to be able to type 'read work assignment' and it WILL READ IT, not say 'no such thing'. I mean, come on. You know the rule: if the object is in the description IT MUST BE FAMILIAR TO THE PROMPT. I'm really p*ssed cuz I'm stuck in the very beginning and the prompt won' even re-read my instructions cuz it doesn't understand I have them in my inventory? You have GOT TO be kidding me, Andrew.