Hadean Lands Game Reviews

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VERY DIFFICULT. This game is brilliantly crafted, the mountaintop of Interactive Fiction. I found it to be very difficult and time consuming. I’ve considered myself to be fairly adept at Interactive fiction, but I eventually had to resort to walkthroughs, as I had run out of personal time (and energy) to play this. The play is fair, creative, forgiving and well written. The alchemical aspect, as well as the unique time-space malleability make for a world with almost an almost dizzying array of options, and a dimension of problem solving (layers of cascading dependencies) I hadn’t encountered before. If you are a beginner at Interactive fiction, or (like me) you enjoy a casual puzzler now and then, you may want to skip this for now, and save this title for later. But DO PLAY it when you can dedicate a level of time, concentration and dedication that a master puzzle requires.

Strange and Engaging. This is a game I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. It’s got one of the strangest concepts I’ve seen—alchemy mixed with science fiction, and yet it works. It’s a text adventure, but don’t let that scare you off, the game does a lot to make your puzzle solving as painless as possible, and from what I’ve seen thus far it’s very difficult to put things into an unwinnable state. I won’t say impossible, just because bugs and weird mistakes can always happen. I must praise the game’s accessibility with VoiceOver, the built-in screen reader on iOS. Even the map works, something I wasn’t necessarily expecting. All I can say is, if you like logical puzzles, an expansive setting, and don’t mind reading to have fun, you’ll definitely enjoy this game.

Practice your Alchemy. Andrew Plotkin has been writing some of the best interactive fiction available and giving it away, for free, for a very long time. There are lots of puzzles here, lots of ways to think about problems, but most importantly there are reasons to go back and solve them with new techniques and new tools as you acquire them and learn how to use them to husband your resources as you progress through the game. Building the ‘reset’ loop into the game as a “diagetic" story telling element is a neat touch. Making it easy to quickly fly through previous puzzles gives a way to let you chunk them up in your brain and think about the meta-puzzle. It has been a long time since the Kickstarter for this game (almost 4 years?), but I have to say it was worth the wait.

A Puzzling Masterpiece. This may well be the most inventive game you play all year. From the setting — an alchemy-based spaceship — to the alchemy-based resource puzzles to the absolutely revolutionary mechanics, this game absolutely blew me away. Hadean Lands is a pretty unabashed puzzle game, of the classic “player alone in a mysterious place where Something has Happened” genre. You play an alchemical MacGyver, starting from learning the very basics of the craft and ending up performing feats worthy of the ship’s master alchemists. The alchemical rituals themselves are the focus of the game, but the name “ritual” belies just how much flexibility the game allows, and just how much it rewards ingenuity and lateral thinking. In fact, you have to invent your own variations pretty much off the bat, so read carefully and pay attention to potential substitutions and opposites. But the best part is that once you learn how to do something, even something that requires walking all over the place and doing little complicated things, you can just say, “perform this ritual” and the protagonist does it (if they can; if they can’t, the block is reported). Once you know where a key is, just try to walk through the door, and the game makes a little note “First getting the key” and lets you do it. Repetition is kept to a minimum so that you can focus on thinking, exploring, and performing the next task — and to make failure always totally an option. This is a revolutionary mechanic, and I do not say that lightly. But at the same time, it’s not a gimmick: it is tightly tied to the game you are playing, and it makes perfect sense in and reinforces the game’s environment. Like any game, it’s not perfect. There are a few minor bugs, and puzzles that are insufficiently clued. (Hint: you can use lead) The bigger flaws tend to come from Interactive Fiction genre conventions, which tend to frown on the cutting of knots (Gordian or otherwise). The protagonist, stuck on a half-dead spaceship, occasionally feels insufficiently motivated: being unwilling to, say, cut the $%#ing orichalcum in half, or burn/break down a door. And there are cases where a good dose of acid ought to do the trick. I’m OK with the game blocking these, I just wish there were better reasons given.

Incredible work. This is one of the deepest and cleverest pieces of interactive fiction every created. The iOS version has some very nice ease of use features, like being able to see a log of things you have learned, a map with tap-to-move, and the option to tap a word in the text to insert it into the prompt. This might be my favorite version of the game, but I recommend playing it with a Bluetooth keyboard if you can.

Innovative yet classic. I've played a lot of interactive fiction games, but I've rarely beaten them. Usually, I get stuck on a difficult puzzle and I am not interested in the fiction enough to stick with it. This game haunted me for several days until I beat it. On the puzzles - they are very challenging, and the game rewards you for exploring and does a good job of giving you hints through the game world itself. You feel really smart when you figure out the little twists you can do with some rituals. I did need a couple of hints, but once I got them they were head-slappers I could have figured out myself. I think a lot of the reason this game was enjoyable all the way through for me was the unique and interesting setting (a wrecked alchemical starship stuck in some kind of time loop). It made all the room locations and equipment overall locale very interesting all by itself, even without interaction. On the writing, part of what makes the game great is that it really plays to the strength of the format - if this game had graphics, it wouldn't be as good. The text works in the brain in a way that is much more immersive and moving than a graphical game can be, IMO. Stylistically, it's sharp and concise, without lacking detail. It also is playful to interact with the world and your inventory and the game feels very responsive. On game design and coding - the "flow" of the game comes across at a very enjoyable pace. I found myself making many sections of great strides, punctuated by short gaps of having to dig deeper to discover what to do next. Every discovery leads to the next, and there are many tidbits that you can see but not use right away that make it intriguing to puzzle through. I also liked how the reset mechanism worked as a game mechanic AND a literary plot device. And it's great to see many people furiously discussing the ending and debating what REALLY happened aboard the Retort. And I love that there IS no set answer for it - the plot itself is a puzzle and it changes as you play. The technical innovations for this type of game - with the short cutting of known rituals and being able to jump around using the map were big pluses for me, having been a longtime fan of IF - it's neat to see an old dog doing new tricks, as it were. I could go on and on - it's a great game. If you've loved IF in the past, this game will make you love it again. If you've never played IF, this game will make you love it (or hate it) but it will spoil you, as it might well be the best IF adventure game yet made. Super great work, Zarf. Make more like this and I hope people buy them enough to support you to keep making them. Your love of the format and skill at it, through years of previous games, really shine through. I think it's a kind of masterpiece.

Wow. This game is amazing. It’s fundamentally a text adventure, and anyone who’s played Zork or even the original Adventure game will have no trouble figuring out the types of commands it’s likely to understand. But there are some player aids, such as separate tabs with a pre-drawn map, a list of the alchemical rituals you know, and a page for your own notes. You won’t need a pile of scratch paper like you did with Zork-era adventures. Still, if you’re not into typing commands at a game, you might not like it. But the writing is excellent, the puzzles are thematic, difficult, and multi-layered, and you will get drawn into the game’s curious world. If I had to find a fault, it would be that the ending is on the bleak side. But you’ll have lots of fun getting to the ending (and you won’t get there very quickly in any case).

Brilliant, innovative parser-based interactive fiction. To get this out of the way: this is IF/text adventure, but it's not about solving mazes and playing guess-the-verb. It is about intricate, fascinating puzzles with a unique iterative mechanic that gives you a sense of mastery; a detailed, coherent alternate universe based on alchemy; and an overall meta-puzzle as the player tries to figure out what happened, not to mention who he/she is. Innovative parser commands streamline gameplay so you're thinking about the game, not the mechanics, and the iOS interface gives you an interactive map and journal, as well as multiple ways of minimizing typing. The game is a joy to play, but fair warning: it swallowed up an entire week of my time.

Delightful and brilliant. Fun fun game. Zarf has outdone himself.

Unique and absorbing. This game is unlike any other adventure game I have ever played, combining a mystery adventure, puzzles, a new take on the sci-fi genre. Think Myst meets WH4K crossed with Simon the Sorcerer.

Deeper than it looks. On day 1, you'll think this is an interesting little text-based adventure game. By day 3, you'll realize it's the best such game ever written and will set the bar for all future games in this genre. Incredible.

Intricate and amazing. I've played interactive fiction for many years, so I was excited to find such a complex, rich game. Plotkin's games are always interesting, but this really is his best yet, from the way the story and the world are constructed as you play, to the alchemical puzzles. (Beginners might start with the Dreamhold instead.)

Absolutely fantastic. I really thoroughly enjoyed the game and feel this is one of the best interactive fiction games I've played. Truly phenomenal and detailed.

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Go and play this right now.. There's a reason this game has had such fantastic reviews: it is, indeed, fantastic. Stop reading this review and click the Buy button. Right. Now.

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Not well adapted to iPhone. TL;DR: Does not cross over well from PC, would not recommend I love interactive fiction, and the story is enjoyable -- but this game is an exercise in tedium on the iPhone. To play you need to type in long spell incantations that autocorrect can't help you with, as they are often made up words. Therefore, autocorrect must be disabled (or fought with) making general play a pain due to typos. The spellings for the components of incantations and spells are split amongst multiple references you carry with you, but which are hard to access due to poor interface design, making the construction of phrases extremely annoying. Sorry, would not recommend even with a Bluetooth keyboard. Does not cross over well from the PC.

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