Hadean Lands 9+

This game is brilliantly crafted, the mountaintop of Interactive Fiction. I found it to be very difficult and time consuming. I’ve considered myself to be fairly adept at Interactive fiction, but I eventually had to resort to walkthroughs, as I had run out of personal time (and energy) to play this.

The play is fair, creative, forgiving and well written. The alchemical aspect, as well as the unique time-space malleability make for a world with almost an almost dizzying array of options, and a dimension of problem solving (layers of cascading dependencies) I hadn’t encountered before.

If you are a beginner at Interactive fiction, or (like me) you enjoy a casual puzzler now and then, you may want to skip this for now, and save this title for later. But DO PLAY it when you can dedicate a level of time, concentration and dedication that a master puzzle requires.

This game is unlike any other adventure game I have ever played, combining a mystery adventure, puzzles, a new take on the sci-fi genre.

Think Myst meets WH4K crossed with Simon the Sorcerer.

This is a game I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. It’s got one of the strangest concepts I’ve seen—alchemy mixed with science fiction, and yet it works. It’s a text adventure, but don’t let that scare you off, the game does a lot to make your puzzle solving as painless as possible, and from what I’ve seen thus far it’s very difficult to put things into an unwinnable state. I won’t say impossible, just because bugs and weird mistakes can always happen.
I must praise the game’s accessibility with VoiceOver, the built-in screen reader on iOS. Even the map works, something I wasn’t necessarily expecting. All I can say is, if you like logical puzzles, an expansive setting, and don’t mind reading to have fun, you’ll definitely enjoy this game.