#hadean lands

[timelooptournament]

has anyone submitted the game Hadean Lands?

Hadean Lands has been added to The Timeloop Tournament

[believerindaydreams]

Strange Airlock

This chamber is not hexagonal, but it reminds you of a hexagon in all directions, if that makes sense. Perhaps it doesn't.

...behold, everything I love and hate about text adventures

[tsulean]

jesus christ, Hadean Lands is a fucking amazing game. like not just “amazing for an Infocom-style text adventure”, just straight up a really solid game, 10/10, excellent puzzles, evocative prose, the plot is still eating my brain.

the premise is that your alchemy-based spaceship has crashed on a dead world, space and time are deeply fucked up as a result of some alchemical accident, and you have to fix the ship.

(slight spoiler for the TES lore-inclined: the ship’s dragons are broken, yes really)

(rest is under a cut because it got long. i‘m apparently a giant fan of the puzzle setup.)

the puzzles are this fantastic mix of INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT and extremely forgiving. difficult, because the game repeatedly asks you to take multi-step alchemical rituals you know, and use them to invent rituals you don’t know. forgiving, because the spacetime fuckery means you cannot put the game into an unwinnable state. you can always reset the universe back to the beginning of the game and try again. in fact you cannot complete the game without resetting the universe at least a dozen times.

FORTUNATELY the game is not as maddeningly repetitive as this sounds. once you know how to get to the Observatory, you can just type GO TO OBSERVATORY and the game will perform all the intermediate steps. this means that the puzzles in this game move seamlessly from “how do i open this door” to “which doors do i need to open" and “how do i manage my resources”, which is really fantastic-- I don’t think I’ve ever played another game that handled puzzle progression this well. (If you have, let me know and I will play it!)

tl;dr Hadean Lands is the best game I’ve played in the past several years, I love it a lot, I wish it weren’t a puzzle game because puzzle games have next to no replay value :(

[starmade-shadows-archived]

just... i love how 90% of the other formulas in Hadean Lands are flat-out magic and this one is just

it’s fluorite + sulfuric acid which is just fuckin

straight-up a recipe for goddamn hydrofluoric acid

you ain’t half shittin’ me ensign forsyth

[toolusingmammalgirl]

Hadean Lands is a really neat interactive-fiction game/colossal design achievement born of pure madness in which you must repair an alchemy-powered spaceship one step at a time.

So far, the world is interesting, the puzzles are clever, and there’s a lovely system of fast-traveling and shortcutting through complex rituals you’ve already done. Once you’re on the game’s wavelength and know your way around the text commands, it’s fun as all hell.

@deusvulture, check it out on Steam.

[overthinkingvideogames]

IF Only: Hadean Lands Will Teach You Alchemy

Andrew Plotkin's gorgeously complex interactive fiction comes to Steam.

If spending $35 makes you play hintless, it might still be worth it. Hadean Lands is all about mastery, about a gradual climb from clueless internship to near-divine power over the forces of the universe. Playing it without hints is challenging, but fair and worthwhile, a fitting expression of your character’s lonely ascent. I know whereof I speak: when I played, there was no one to ask.

When you begin, you have access to a single ritual: words to speak, ingredients to use, a special space called a bound where your alchemical power can be contained and expressed. Soon you begin to find more ingredients, more rituals, more words of power. Occasionally you have a chance to experiment with your own variant versions of these rituals.

On Hadean Lands.