Hadean Lands
Zarfhome Software · 2016 · Interactive Fiction, Text-Based, Indie, Adventure, Choose Your Own Adventure
PC
Positive91% · 44
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About Hadean Lands
Marooned in an alien, airless wasteland — your starship fractured — your crewmates missing. Can an apprentice alchemist learn how to survive?
Hadean Lands is interactive fiction — a classic text adventure. No graphics! No dialogue trees! No point-and-click! You type your commands, and read what happens next.
(Keyboard controls only. Because you have to type everything. Get it?)
Hadean Lands is a game of alchemy and exploration, with an intricate structure of interlinked puzzles. Every ritual you learn adds a new ability to your toolkit. But every ritual requires a different combination of ingredients, and some ingredients are in desperately short supply.
The game's sophisticated goal-tracking system permits you to experiment freely! Any ritual you've learned can be performed with a single command. Any puzzle that you've ever solved can be re-solved automatically. Click on the in-game map to travel to any room you're familiar with; the goal system will even find known keys and re-solve intermediate puzzles to get there. But beware: many puzzles have multiple solutions. If the ones you've found don't fit together, you may have to go searching for alternatives...
Repairing an alchemical starship single-handed? Not easy; perhaps impossible. You’ll have to discover the rituals you need, and then search for ingredients, and then improvise and substitute. You’ll have to calcine, distill, dissolve, and precipitate. And somehow, somewhere, you’ll have to figure out what happened and why.
Hadean Lands is interactive fiction — a classic text adventure. No graphics! No dialogue trees! No point-and-click! You type your commands, and read what happens next.
(Keyboard controls only. Because you have to type everything. Get it?)
Hadean Lands is a game of alchemy and exploration, with an intricate structure of interlinked puzzles. Every ritual you learn adds a new ability to your toolkit. But every ritual requires a different combination of ingredients, and some ingredients are in desperately short supply.
The game's sophisticated goal-tracking system permits you to experiment freely! Any ritual you've learned can be performed with a single command. Any puzzle that you've ever solved can be re-solved automatically. Click on the in-game map to travel to any room you're familiar with; the goal system will even find known keys and re-solve intermediate puzzles to get there. But beware: many puzzles have multiple solutions. If the ones you've found don't fit together, you may have to go searching for alternatives...
Repairing an alchemical starship single-handed? Not easy; perhaps impossible. You’ll have to discover the rituals you need, and then search for ingredients, and then improvise and substitute. You’ll have to calcine, distill, dissolve, and precipitate. And somehow, somewhere, you’ll have to figure out what happened and why.
DLC & expansions
🎁 Complete the collection
Base game + 0 of 1 DLC at today's best prices (some DLC unpriced).
$11.99
to own everything
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Interesting concept, and functionally executed, but the core mechanic gets repetitive quick. Find locked thing Work through delicate series of commands to fashion magic key Open locked thing Take a couple steps Repeat I'd say this is a good game for you if you enjoy the satisfaction of following a complex recipe to making something. Personally, I'm more of a microwave dinner man.
This was really fun. Almost reminds me of Outer Wilds, in a way. Might take a bit of getting used to if you're new to IF, but worth checking out as long as you're not against reading!
An instant classic from one of the great visionaries in the field. Without spoiling too much, the most mind-boggling part of the game has to be the implementation. I can only imagine how complicated the autocomplete system (for lack of a better term) was to implement. Because of how this works, the puzzles become stacked on top of each other in complex chains of alchemical dependency graphs. Really unique, the closest I've seen to it is the IF *Endless, Nameless*, but the implementation here is seamless, whereas there the user had to explicitly record sequences of actions and stop recording. The story is a bit undercooked IMO, which is a shame because the story that *is* there is pretty intriguing. But the puzzles and general IF experience are top of the line. If you've played any of Zarf's games before, you'll recognize the mix of brutal mind-bending puzzles, well-written ambiance, and a story you have to piece together on your own. Highly recommended.
This is one of the most unique worlds ive come across. worth every penny.
Very atmospheric text adventure where the main game mechanics describes the fictional universe. Complex, satisfying puzzles and very user friendly.
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.
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