Incline Hadean Lands

[Blaine]

I performed a forum search, and turned up four mentions of Hadean Lands: Three (posted before the game's release) referring to developer Andrew Plotkin and his successful Kickstarter to fund the titular game and one offhand mention of Hadean Lands during a discussion of the adventure game industry.

They call this genre "interactive fiction" now, but many of these games are text parser adventures rather than pretentious hipster art games/mental masturbation. Hadean Lands is one of the former.

I've been playing for a few hours, and it's probably the first adventure game of any sort that's genuinely challenged me in years. The gist of the game is that you accumulate alchemical formulae, invocations and words of power, various "facts" and clues, and reagents as you explore. You must learn to perform increasingly complex alchemical rituals, which tend to provide you with devices, enchanted tokens, fluids, etc. which are then used to solve or partly solve many of the puzzles.

The complexity ramps up as you play, and I'm having a blast. The game is well written, and the alchemical fluff seems to be well researched. It incorporates many familiar real-world elements, chemicals, flora, and fauna.

I've barely touched "IF" past the turn of the century, but I'm glad I picked this up.

 

[Aenra]

Am almost willing to neglect your ceaseless ego-stroking, money flaunting, artificially constructed and loudly presented idiocuncracies just for this one post Blaine

Believe it or not, i was just googleing for Hadean + RPGcodex myself .. Bought it a couple of hours ago, and i must say, i never thought i'd go 'text' again.. until now.
Definitely get it, it's worth its 5 bucks and then some.
Do yourself a favour, play it not in the tube, leave it for home. Worth it. If like me, the word 'interpreter' only had one meaning for you, you will need to read this prior to purchasing:

http://hadeanlands.com/how/

 

[Blaine]

idiocuncracies

I'm quoting your post just for this one word. It is, by far, the best word I've read all month.

play it not in the tube, leave it for home.

That's not an issue for me. Only peasants ride the tube—or play games on mobile devices, for that matter.

 

[Tramboi]

I'm playing this right now, a few hours in, and it seems to have a great puzzle design.
And a very smooth if experience, with "recall", "go to", and meta/macro-operations...
It's must have been quite hard to implement.
It's already worth the cost after 5 hours of nice gameplay.

 

[Blaine]

I'm playing this right now, a few hours in, and it seems to have a great puzzle design.
And a very smooth if experience, with "recall", "go to", and meta/macro-operations...
It's must have been quite hard to implement.
It's already worth the cost after 5 hours of nice gameplay.

Told you so.

It's amazing how little discussion there is of this game on the Codex amongst supposedly adventure game enthusiasts. It doesn't have cute hipster graphics, though, so....

 

[Tramboi]

Thanks for the plug, Blaine.
Went totally under my radar, because I quite abandoned the non-commercial if scene a few years ago.
And I've been beaten badly by a game like Curses, so I'm wary of hardcore puzzlefests.

 

[Blaine]

Oh, Hadean Lands defeated me. I made it very far, from what I can tell, but I still haven't finished it.

I didn't realize it had defeated me at first, but I took a break from it to depressurize my poor brain, played something else for a little while, and then a month or three later realized I'd essentially forfeited. Naturally, I'm never going to look up even a single hint for it, either. It's either legit or quit.

I'm not a puzzle genius, that's for sure. I know because I'm subscribed to the YouTube channels of actual puzzle geniuses who routinely make me feel like a sentient cantaloupe. Still, becoming good at puzzles is less a matter of actual intelligence (although a certain level of intelligence is needed) and more a matter of solving lots and lots and lots of puzzles. The ancient Chinese knew that working at something for thousands of hours is the true path to genius in almost all cases.

There are certain kinds of puzzles that I'm very good at, and others that I suck at. The "scrambled picture" puzzles with sliding boxes and one piece missing pissed me off as a kid, and only in very recent years have I gotten to the point of being able to solve them relatively quickly and easily. I am very good at logistical and mechanical puzzles, though, and I estimate I'm in the top 5% of players in the world at Infinifactory (based on my scores on the game's acknowledged hardest puzzles).

 

[Tramboi]

Minds work in different and mysterious ways.
I solve what might be considered as hard puzzles at work (reverse engineering, emu coding, and stuff like this) but I frequently fail in video games.
One classic case is the repackaged math problem.
I can express it as a puzzle mathematically and solve it, then lose interest because the interface gets in the way (myst-likes, notably).
For puzzles where I have to think truly out of the box, well, let's say I'm just lame.

PS: We'll discuss what intelligence is when the codex will have settled "what is a RPG".