Hadean Lands

This interactive fiction is a very fun, puzzle-oriented experience. It features an interesting mechanic that allows you to restart from the beginning while retaining your knowledge about the world and its formulas. Additionally, you can perform many familiar actions with just one or two commands, avoiding the tedium of repeating the same tasks.

The only downside is that it doesn't provide enough explanation from a story perspective, and the ending felt a bit disappointing and confusing to me. Despite this, it is still highly recommended, especially if you enjoy puzzle-fests like Curses, Jigsaw, So Far, The Mulldoon Legacy, and others.

I learned of this game through a review that described it as "so difficult that it isn't a game." I would disagree with that - I feel like I'm making progress, but wow, doing this without hints is rough. There are about 20 different things that I realize I need to do, but figuring out HOW to do literally any of them is getting me. This game isn't so much about figuring out the solution to the puzzles but instead figuring out how to actually enact that solution. I'm loving it so far.

Finished it after around 47 hours. Excellent IF, difficult but fair ; even if I struggled sometimes to make my way around, I never felt bored at the point I wanted to abandon.
I wish there were more IF of this quality.

feels like an old school infocom game, but one of the really good ones. But I hope you like text!

Save wiped completely outta the blue. What I did read wasn't very engaging, anyhow - perhaps this shares with photopia the curse of pioneering new techniques then being left as the worst example of them. Heard the puzzles are good but a couple hours in I had yet to stumble upon anything more than what amounted to a fetch quest sprinkled with bits of clerical work. Nah.

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.

Hardcore interactive fiction with a complex magic/crafting system that is more or less the ultimate realization of the promise of the Enchanter trilogy, though with a different, less flashy flavor. If you felt wonder and awe at such cantrips as GNUSTO and TINSOT and GIRGOL, you will love the arcane rituals of Hadean Lands. The system of correspondences and the sometimes quite open-ended puzzles make for an experience different from the more straightforward (though sometimes also more obtuse) puzzles of the old Infocom classics. IF fans have hard sci-fi (Starcross), and now we have hard, uh, alchemy. Along with Anchorhead, this is the best post-80s IF on the market.

It took me 4 years and 3 restarts to make my way through this game. The first section is brutal in the sheer quantity of concepts and text descriptions it throws at you, none of which adds up anything particularly satisfying in terms of puzzle solving. You spend the first hour or two of the game entering long ritual commands, mostly by rote, then spend many more hours walking around picking up and digesting lengthy ritual descriptions. I did not enjoy this part of the game at all, and if this game did not have such a glowing reputation, I probably would have written it off and never come back to it.

However, once I had gotten over that first hump, read through all the notes and worked out which sections of the game need ‘solving’, the game became a lot more compelling. In fact, this game has taken up most of my free time for a couple of weeks now. Once you have fully digested the alchemy system and start chaining rituals it really is quite addictive, and a much stronger core mechanic than what most other adventure games offer. Not all the puzzles are great but a higher than usual number are complex and satisfying. The setting also becomes a lot more compelling the further you get in, with some of the final rituals making for a suitably climactic ending to the game. The story comes across as an afterthought but there are eventually a few items of interest there as well.

Overall, I do think most fans of the genre will get a lot out of playing this game. There is a lot to like here, and there are some interface and design elements that I think could be used to improve practically any text adventure. But be forewarned that the game expects a lot from your attention span immediately and takes a little while to start paying off.

I did buy the “I will not check a walkthrough” certificate but did not follow it. There was a half dozen or so puzzles I doubt I would have ever worked out by myself. My hat goes off to anyone who did.

Hadean Lands is concerned with a situation rather than with a story, and this isn't a put down. Many well-loved movies dramatize situations--Dog Day Afternoon is a familiar example. In this game's case, a disaster of some kind has befallen a ship belonging to a sort of navy of alchemists. The protagonist is concerned with surviving the incident and, perhaps, repairing the damage.

The core loop of the game consists of performing rituals of alchemy. Alchemy is apparently central to the navy's operation and you, an ensign with presumably limited training, must accumulate recipes and ingredients in order to open doors and containers that house still more recipes and agreement. On paper, it sounds a bit like Enchanter, but the reality is quite different.

Hadean Lands has a complex and incredibly well-implemented system of Alchemy. Most steps of an alchemical recipe (there are always multiple steps) have their own rich, evocative descriptions. Given the number of recipes available, these descriptions reflect the remarkable care with which the game treats matters both great and small.

Tracking recipes and ingredients poses a significant information management problem, and Hadean Lands graciously takes on a significant portion of that burden. Once an area has been discovered, you can return to it immediately with a GO TO [ROOM] command. If alchemical processes are required to reach the room, the game will automatically perform them. It is also possible to GO TO [ITEM]. The game maintains a list of discovered rituals, facts, and formulas that the player can recall with a command. All of those features make it possible to RESET the game world in order to use different ingreadients or solve problems in different ways. A player can even skip certain problems because they have already found the rituals that are beyond them. Most remarkably, the game tracks doors and containers that the player has yet to open.

Still, this is a massive game, and I found myself managing quite a bit of information on my own. There are just so many data and items to keep track of that the lists of things that can be recalled are massive by game's end. I argue that information management is one of the key challenges to meet in the late/endgame.

The endgame is very hard. I don't want to spoil any puzzles, so I will just say that I had a hard time reaching the end. However, despite my troubles, the puzzles were logical and fair.

So far as the ending goes: I think it assumes (reasonably) that a certain amount of attention will be paid to sights and events that have no direct effect on the main storyline (incident line?). I was so focused on the core gameplay loop that I think I must have missed out on these opportunities.

The system of Alchemy is novel, well-authored. and impressively realized. Those who enjoy it--and I suspect many will--will find in Hadean Lands an immensely satisfying and challenging experience.

I believe this game reflects the current state of the art for Interactive Fiction, and, as such, is an *important* game for people who follow the genre to experience.

Absolutely stunningly brilliant game that rewired the way my brain works a little. If you have remotely any interest in IF, game design, or alchemy you need to pick it up.

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 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

Have you ever played a RPG and when it comes to magic, it's a bit disappointing? You put a cheese and a flower together and suddenly you have a poition. Well this is the game you've been waiting for. You have a full alchemical magic system that you have to learn. You have to find binding phrasees, learn about elemental associations and even smells. Some rituals are found, some you have to invent yourself. First purely text based game I've played since the Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls days and it's spectacular. Darn difficult though, so not for those with low tolerance for frustration.

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:

• 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 ', 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.
  

[*]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.

Easily the best, cleverest, most original adventure game I've ever played. Don't let the text interface scare you off, this game more than justifies dealing with the learning curve.

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.

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 ", 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.)

This is a masterfully created interactive fiction by one of my favourite IF creators. The world is strange and richly detailed, and the puzzles are clever and expertly designed. Other reviews have gone into detail describing setting and content; I'll simply urge you to play this amazing game.

Last Interactive Fiction game I played was Zork, all those long years ago. I had terrible memories: it was hard, confusing and frustrating. I'm not sure why I decided to buy Hadean Lands then (a game to play during work downtimes, unobtrusively text-based so no one will notice this is definitely not work-related? Something like that, probably), but it was a great idea.

The game is brilliant, hard without being unfair, the puzzles are clever and satisfying, and the writing amazing. The author has this splendid way with words, where with glorious economy everything is made clear, and yet the style is soft, flowing, beautiful.

Obviously, I recommond Hadean lands - but remember, this is not a "let me hold your hand and show you which button to click" game; it's a game where you really have to think outside the box (But never illogically).

Hadean Lands is an excellent modern text adventure / Interactive Fiction game. The puzzles are unique and satisfying, with a good level of difficulty. You'll need to combine the things you find in very interesting ways with rituals and formulas. The game's memory system, allowing you to repeat a series of commands all at once is crucial and an excellent innovation.

All together, Hadean Lands is what IF should be -- the experience of both reading a book and adventuring inside it at the same time.

I played Hadean Lands previously outside of steam. The new packaged verison includes a Game menu that has a built-in map, list of your formulas + rituals, and the IF Reference card, all of which are very useful for new and old players alike!