Hadean Lands: Interactive Alchemical Fiction
| Category | Price | Seller | Device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Games | $4.99 | Andrew Plotkin | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
*Hadean Lands* is interactive fiction — a classic text adventure. No graphics! No menus! No point-and-click! You type your commands, and read what happens next.
This is the most complex puzzle structure I’ve ever designed. It’s the culmination of four years of work. I launched *Hadean Lands* as a Kickstarter project in 2010; it was a runaway success. Now it’s ready for you to play.
- Fluid interface designed for comfortable typing and reading.
- Full-length puzzle adventure with interlocking alchemical challenges.
- Pop-up palette of commonly used commands.
- Built-in game map — tap to go directly to any explored room.
- Journal tab records all the recipes and rituals that you’ve discovered.
- Full support for VoiceOver (speech output) and dictation (speech input) on devices that offer these features.
“The overall arc, for me, was that I spent the first bit of the game really excited about the possibility space, and then the next several hours feeling like my head was going to explode... This game ranks off the charts on the ingenuity measure.” — Emily Short
“The bottom line is that Hadean Lands makes great strides towards perfecting the classic adventure game — not just the text adventure.” — Steven Watson, AdventureGamers.com
*This game requires a lot of memory... for a text adventure. Performance may be poor on the iPad 2, iPhone 4, or iPod touch 4th-gen. Newer devices should be fine.*
Reviews
Strange and Engaging
BlindguyNW
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
Edward Kmett
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
Dolohov
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.
Intricate and amazing
Curiosity jones
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
JTTraub
I really thoroughly enjoyed the game and feel this is one of the best interactive fiction games I've played. Truly phenomenal and detailed.
Wow
tgl42
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
Inconstant Reader
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.
Deeper than it looks
jmi11s
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.
Innovative yet classic
ColinT games
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.
