A Puzzling Masterpiece – Hadean Lands: Interactive Alchemical Fiction Review

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.
Review by Dolohov on Hadean Lands: Interactive Alchemical Fiction.