Has anyone here played this before? I'm guessing not, so I'll take a few minutes to gush about it with the hopes that maybe a few people will try it. 
If, even as recently as a few weeks ago, someone had told me that I'd be actually willing to pay real cash money for an Interactive Fiction (IF) game in the year 2016, I'd have thought they were crazy. If someone had told me that it had some of the most fun and interesting gameplay of any new game that I've played in years, I'd think they were even crazier still. And yet... they are completely right!!
The game is called Hadean Lands and it is an absolute treasure.
The game begins with you, the lowly Ensign J. Forsyth, an apprentice aboard His Majesty's starship The Unanswerable Retort, waking up in a daze in the aftermath of some sort of bizarre calamity. Keep in mind that this isn't your average starship. Hadean Lands is set in a future based on an intriguing speculation: what if the alchemists of medieval Europe were the true founders of modern science? That is to say, the The Unanswerable Retort runs on alchemy!
Thus, the gameplay revolves around figuring out, using all five of your senses, a bunch of weird alchemical rituals and applying them (using the ship's labratories and various ingredients you come across) to solve puzzles to aid you in repairing the starship and rescuing your crewmates. The rituals involving setting up a proper environment, uttering/intoning/singing various sealing/binding words, combining various ingredients, invoking mathematical concepts, etc. There's recipes (which you sometimes need to modify), but you can also experiment freely and everything you do gives clear feedback as to whether what you're doing is working or not.
Better yet is that a clever world-reset mechanic, sophisticated auto-travel and find commands, and the ability to repeat any complex ritual that you've already successfully completed work together to completely eliminate the tedious "fetch quest" aspect that plagues most other types of adventure games, allowing you to use your full concentration solving the puzzles. (which, by the way, are all extremely fair.) And, although is a pure text adventure, it does come with a pair of gui elements: an auto-updating map and a little codex that keeps track of various formulas, rituals, and facts for you so you don't have to use the "recall" command quite so often.
Anyways, I can't recommend this game highly enough. I absolutely loved it and I say that as someone who otherwise doesn't like IF much at all. You can buy the game on steam or at humblebundle. It costs only 12 dollars and worth every single penny.
If, even as recently as a few weeks ago, someone had told me that I'd be actually willing to pay real cash money for an Interactive Fiction (IF) game in the year 2016, I'd have thought they were crazy. If someone had told me that it had some of the most fun and interesting gameplay of any new game that I've played in years, I'd think they were even crazier still. And yet... they are completely right!!
The game is called Hadean Lands and it is an absolute treasure.
The game begins with you, the lowly Ensign J. Forsyth, an apprentice aboard His Majesty's starship The Unanswerable Retort, waking up in a daze in the aftermath of some sort of bizarre calamity. Keep in mind that this isn't your average starship. Hadean Lands is set in a future based on an intriguing speculation: what if the alchemists of medieval Europe were the true founders of modern science? That is to say, the The Unanswerable Retort runs on alchemy!
Thus, the gameplay revolves around figuring out, using all five of your senses, a bunch of weird alchemical rituals and applying them (using the ship's labratories and various ingredients you come across) to solve puzzles to aid you in repairing the starship and rescuing your crewmates. The rituals involving setting up a proper environment, uttering/intoning/singing various sealing/binding words, combining various ingredients, invoking mathematical concepts, etc. There's recipes (which you sometimes need to modify), but you can also experiment freely and everything you do gives clear feedback as to whether what you're doing is working or not.
Better yet is that a clever world-reset mechanic, sophisticated auto-travel and find commands, and the ability to repeat any complex ritual that you've already successfully completed work together to completely eliminate the tedious "fetch quest" aspect that plagues most other types of adventure games, allowing you to use your full concentration solving the puzzles. (which, by the way, are all extremely fair.) And, although is a pure text adventure, it does come with a pair of gui elements: an auto-updating map and a little codex that keeps track of various formulas, rituals, and facts for you so you don't have to use the "recall" command quite so often.
Anyways, I can't recommend this game highly enough. I absolutely loved it and I say that as someone who otherwise doesn't like IF much at all. You can buy the game on steam or at humblebundle. It costs only 12 dollars and worth every single penny.