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.
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 available now for MacOS, Windows, Linux, and iOS.
Purchase Hadean Lands on Steam! (Mac/Win/Linux)
Purchase Hadean Lands on Itch.IO! Add tip if you choose. (Mac/Win/Linux)
(Note that purchases on each platform are separate. An Itch purchase does not come with a Steam key, etc.)
(Also note that the iPad/iPhone version hasn't been updated in a few years, and is no longer fully supported. Sorry. Code got too old to update for the latest iOS.)
Winner of the XYZZY Interactive Fiction Awards for Best Puzzles, Best Setting, Best Implementation, and Best Use of Innovation for 2014.
“The overall arc, for me, was that I spent the first bit of the game really excited about the possibility space, and then the next several hours feeling like my head was going to explode... This game ranks off the charts on the ingenuity measure.” — Emily Short
“Feeling pretty smug after finally beating Hadean Lands last night WITH NO HINTS. Great, great game.” — Ken Jennings (...also, spoiler: “V erivirq Onebf svefg.”)
“I love IF. I love the freedom. I love that I can try licking a mysterious crystal thing and get a response.” — BJK White
“The best video game I played last year is a science-fiction thriller about alchemy, and it has no graphics or sound effects.” — David Auerbach, Slate
“Hadean Lands is an endlessly clever experience.” — Sean Clancy, Pocket Tactics
“Dziś niektórzy są zdania, że Hadean Lands to pierwsza od wielu lat gra, która nie tylko wciąga gracza bez reszty, ale też otwiera przed gatunkiem nowe, zaskakujące możliwości.” — Anna Rymsza, dobreprogamy
“The bottom line is that Hadean Lands makes great strides towards perfecting the classic adventure game — not just the text adventure.” — Steven Watson, AdventureGamers.com
More reviews: Byron Alexander Campbell at Entropy; Gregory Avery-Weir at Ludus Novus; Chaunton at MindHut
Press clips about the release: Pocket Tactics, Adventure Gamers, Pocket Gamer, Indie Games, Venus Patrol, RegretZero
Interview: Andrew Plotkin on Hadean Lands — Indie Games, interview via Konstantinos Dimopoulos
I speak about the design of Hadean Lands — audio presentation at WordPlay in Toronto
This map is included with Hadean Lands. You can also view a version which includes the names of the rooms you will explore.
This screenshot is from the MacOS version of the game.
These screenshots are from the iPhone version.
Interested in how I did it? The Inform 7 source code is now available for your perusal. (Educational use only, sorry. This is not an open-source release.)
Hadean Lands is a Zarfhome Production.
(Zarfhome press kit and company info. Zarfhome privacy policy.)
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