Practice your Alchemy – Hadean Lands: Interactive Alchemical Fiction Review

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.
Review by Edward Kmett on Hadean Lands: Interactive Alchemical Fiction.