Archive for January, 2015

Hadean Lands: Failed Marriage

A comment on my last post got me unstuck, at least for a little while. The key was performing as much of the Great Marriage as I could, even though I couldn’t complete it. Actually, I had already inadvertently tried this. I often start rituals and only notice halfway through that I’m missing a key formula. But in this specific case, I also failed to notice that I had done the doable part incorrectly. Sometimes it’s easy to skip a step: a recipe will throw in a phrase like “in an orderly environment”, and if you’re not paying adequate attention, you can just pass over it like it’s mere descriptive text rather than a specific instruction to prepare your ritual bound with an object symbolizing order. So I failed to get the effect I should have from the partial ritual, and once I realized I couldn’t complete it, I had little reason to try it again.

Doing it right had a number of strange and mysterious effects, and led immediately to repairing one of the dragons — but only one. I still haven’t managed to make a Dragon Fulcrum, which (if I understand its purpose correctly) would let me shift the repair around from dragon to dragon. I still need to find or make a ritual bound of metallic quicksilver for that. I thought before that it was going to be one of the two bounds marked on the map that I hadn’t visited yet, but I’ve visited them both by now, and no such luck. The repair does, however, persist across resets, which is kind of strange. In the process of poking around at dragons, I discovered that viewing them with a resonant oculus (a device for revealing occult connections, providing essential clues through much of the game) basically tells you what puzzles you’ll solve by repairing them. Surely I had tried this before? Probably, weeks ago, when I had more on my plate and the information was less meaningful, relatively speaking. I didn’t learn much from this — my guesses from my last post about the obstacles removed by Syndesis, Baros, and Pneuma were broadly correct. But I had no idea about the fourth dragon, Aistheta, and now I do.

Of the strange and mysterious effects, one was particularly mysterious to me. The four frozen-in-time NPCs that I had seen earlier were all in new locations, in different poses — I figure I’ve jumped ahead in time relative to them, or possibly backward. (Maybe I didn’t so much repair Baros as go back to before it broke!) In other locations there were “shadows” of the same NPCs, with descriptions like “You see a faint trailing shadow where Captain Hart was standing.” The strange part is that the shadows actually weren’t where I had seen the characters before. Captain Hart, for example, had started off behind a fracture in the corridor by the officers’ quarters, but her shadow was in the Scaphe Arcade. A bug? I doubted it, considering the care taken with the game generally. It turns out that I had simply missed the characters in their intermediary positions. The characters change position when you perform the (partial) Great Marriage, and change position again when you repair a dragon, and the game assumes that the player spends some time wandering around and solving puzzles between those two events. I, on the other hand, took so long to get to that point that I didn’t have much of anything left to do but take my brand new “homunculus” — which, like “dragon”, doesn’t mean what it sounds like — and try it out on a dragon just to see what happens. I wonder how many players have had the same experience?

Hadean Lands: State of the Stuck

If my posts about Hadean Lands make frequent mention of getting stuck, it’s because it’s a very sticky game. In fact, I’ve been stuck in it for more than a week now. One of the most useful techniques I know for getting unstuck in an adventure game is to just review everything: items in your inventory that you haven’t used yet, obstacles you know of, any other rooms or resources that you don’t yet understand the point of. Often there’s something right in front of your face that you just haven’t been thinking about. This sort of review might not help in graphic adventures when your only problem is that you failed to notice a hotspot… but then again, sometimes it does! Sometimes just understanding your situation better helps you to realize where there should be a hotspot.

So, let’s review my situation live on this blog. Taking inventory is a trickier matter here than it would be in a more conventional adventure, and besides, there’s nothing in here like the classical one-to-one mapping between puzzles and tools to solve them. A chip of granite might be required in a ritual that requires granite, but it can also be used in a ritual that just requires stone, or even placed on a ritual bound’s gestalt shelf to establish an Earthy influence. Little is to be learned from most objects. The real inventory here is knowledge, so let’s examine that.

According to the in-game “rituals” command, I know four rituals that I haven’t managed to perform yet, even in variation. First, there’s the Dragon Fulcrum Inscription, which will be important to getting any use out of the marcher’s Dragons, but which can only be performed at a ritual bound of metallic quicksilver. Ritual bounds are the places where you perform most alchemy (except for certain liquid preparations that instead require a retort). There’s a great many of them all over the place, some with particular properties that enable certain rituals or prevent others. I haven’t found one made of metallic quicksilver yet, but I know of two bounds that I haven’t reached yet — bounds are important enough that they’re marked on the in-game map.

Secondly, there’s Riesenzweig’s Inscription, which allows you to imitate another person’s aura, which would let me get through a certain security door. I’m missing several of the ingredients for this, but I actually have another ritual that does exactly the same thing, so I probably won’t need this version until things start getting trickier in the large scale. The main problem is that it involves creating a token and touching it to the person you want to imitate, and all the other people in the ship are behind “fractures” where I can’t reach them.

Third is Electrum Phlogistication, which I’ve mentioned before: it requires more platinum than I have (or, alternately, a way of creating a catalytic environment without platinum), and it would allow me to create a second piece of Elemental Fire. But I don’t have an immediate use for this.

And finally, there’s the Great Marriage. I can almost do this — all I need is to learn a certain formula to invoke. (Recall that formulas are how the game forces you to gain information before acting on it.) It’s vague what it does, though. The game is very specifically vague about it.

In addition, there’s one ritual (and, I’m surprised to learn, only one) that I’ve successfully performed but haven’t gotten any practical use out of: the Glass Permeability Inscription. Basically, this lets you walk through windows. And there are a couple of windows I’d like to walk though. The problem is that they have hard vacuum on the other side. The game kind of teases the player about this, too. First I thought the breath-holding potion would let me out there, but no, apparently holding your breath in a vacuum just makes it worse. Then there was the dressing room by the exoscaphe — surely they keep spacesuits in there! And they do, but the helmets are missing, and besides, the player character isn’t trained in how to use a spacesuit.

In addition to rituals and formulas, the in-game journal automatically records “facts” — things found on papers or remembered from lectures or discovered in the course of your explorations that are useful to solving puzzles. (I probably should have looked here first!) The earliest one that I haven’t found any use for is a note on the Recursive Metaphor Technique: “…the form or structure of a thing may be joined to the spirit or essence… But to apply it recursively, parsing the structure and spirit of the spirit itself, requires the utmost care…” This is curious enough that I think it’s going to be useful, but I don’t yet know how. There’s a ghost story about another marcher, a lecture on how the laws of natural science may vary with “currents of aither flow between certain stars” — this all seems to be hinting at an explanation of the ship’s current condition. A description of how to do emergency repairs to a Dragon using one of those fulcrums I can’t make. And then there are four fragments concerning vibrations and echoes in the medium where the soul resides. These four fragments are sure to be important, because each was found alongside one of the four Dragons. And yet, they’re so abstruse and theoretical! Most of the facts in the journal are things of immediate practical importance: the combination to a safe, a reminder to always use the Hermetic Sealing when using the chymic retort, a list of associations between musical pitches and metals… well, okay, that’s kind of theoretical too, but at least it deals with matter. All this stuff about soul echoes seems like endgame material, which I’m not ready to process yet.

Now, as for obstacles. The “doors” command lists twelve things I haven’t opened yet. Four of them are blocked by fractures, which I suppose means there’s a way to get rid of fractures, a possibility I hadn’t really considered before discovering the “doors” command. It probably involves repairing Syndesis, the Dragon responsible for maintaining the ship’s spatial coherence. Interestingly, two of the doors are ones that I’ve gotten to the other side of by other means. I suppose their presence on the list means I’ll need to open them anyway, probably to conserve the ritual components I’d consume by not opening them — and the only component I can see that’s consumed in this way is a pinecone. So pinecones are important! Finally I’ve learned something.

Of the other “doors”, three involve gravitational anomalies, which falls under the purview of the dragon Baros. Three have vacuum on the other side, which, now that I’m thinking of this all in terms of what Dragons can fix them, I recognize as the responsibility of Pneuma, who lives in a maze. One is the aura-keyed security door that I mentioned before. And the last is the door to the Tertiary Alchemy Lab, which is simply locked. That door is made of pine, so it seems like getting through it must involve the pinecone somehow. There’s an obvious variation on a ritual for this that doesn’t quite make sense and in fact doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, until I can do something about the fractures, I still need to use the pinecone to reach the Tertiary Alchemy Lab door in the first place.

So if I read things correctly, and if I’m not just missing something, I can’t repair Dragons with what I have, and the only door I can open without repairing a Dragon is the aura-locked one. Which means I need to find a way to imitate the aura of someone I can’t touch. Is this what all that soul-echo business was about? I doubt it, but I’m still stumped for other ideas.

Mind you, there are obstacles that aren’t in the “doors” list. Like those permeable windows. There’s also a cave in the cellar, described as “a maze of claustrophobic cracks”, where you can go in any direction but you just wind up where you started. I have a ritual for finding the center of a maze, but it doesn’t work there, because I’m starting at the center. If I could find a way to invert that ritual, maybe I could get somewhere. The room containing Syndesis has a bunch of “patina-dulled” metal pylons. Could I remove the tarnish from them? Maybe, if I could get there without using up the pinecone.

So, there’s my state. I think I know the shape of my stuckage a little better, but I’m still stuck. I guess the next step is to just go back in and go over the environment with a fine-toothed comb and a Resonant Oculus, looking for things I’ve missed or forgotten about.

Hadean Lands: Yang Oil

The breakthrough mentioned in my last post led to a flurry of progress. At this point, I’m stuck again, but I’ve visited all of the Dragons, and have only a few uncompleted rituals left — including one that, as before, has an obvious application if only I can figure out how to alter it. Discovering the final secret of Elemental Fire was of course a major and long-anticipated part of this, opening most of the rituals on my list to completion. The interesting thing about this is that the breakthrough didn’t lead to Elemental Fire directly. Recall that my problem with the elemental fire ritual was in igniting blackwood. Well, the breakthrough I made led to discovering a different ritual, for synthesizing Yang Oil, which had a different but related problem involving burning splints: it required reed pith to be kept burning while you performed other steps. This was difficult because reed pith is so flammable that any attempt at setting it alight tends to just consume it immediately. This is basically just the opposite of the blackwood problem, but I found it much easier to think of the solution when it was approached from this direction, and once I had done that, the earlier problem was basically solved.

The game’s design is open enough that a different mind than mine could have done things in the other order. For a good long time, there was nothing preventing me from making Elemental Fire but my lack of understanding. What’s more, the game all but forces you to discover the Elemental Fire ritual before the Yang Oil ritual: when you gain access to the midgame, the paper teaching the former is sitting around loose while the latter is several difficult puzzles away. I can see two not-really-contradictory ways of interpreting the author’s intent in this. The first is that the author really wants and expects me to have made Elemental Fire before Yang Oil. The second is that the Yang Oil formula is a deliberate assistance in the Elemental Fire formula, a way of giving you a extra hint in the event that you haven’t figured it out yet that late in the game.

Whatever the intent, coupling the solutions for Elemental Fire and Yang Oil in this way is surely deliberate, because they’re closely related in use. I mentioned early on that some rituals consume components, and speculated that the game would use this to force the player to reset the physical state. Well, by the point I’m at, this happens a lot. There are quite a few unique items with multiple consuming applications. Resetting to use them again has simply become normal. I remember trying to avoid resets when I first started the game, so as not to lose my inventory, but now I do it willy-nilly, even when I don’t need to, because it’s usually easier to just reset than to figure out whether you need to or not. In particular, as I said, you need Elemental Fire for several different rituals, and it turns out each one of them uses it up. Yang Oil, now: that’s used in the ritual to phlogisticate Electrum Regium, making it something that can support more Elemental Fire. With that, it would be possible to overcome the limitations of uniqueness for the first time in the game, using Elemental Fire twice without a reset.

The ironic part: Electrum Regium is an alloy, which you have to make yourself, out of platinum and moon metal. The ritual to phlogisticate it can only be performed in a catalytic environment, and the only way I know to prepare a catalytic environment is to slot some plantinum wire into an adjustable ritual bound. I have just enough platinum to to one of these things, not both. So at this point, barring new discoveries, it seems that in order to get two uses out of Elemental Fire in a single reset, I first have to somehow get two uses out of platinum in a single ritual.

Hadean Lands: How Failure Works

I was making no progress on this game all day, and was all set to make a post about being stuck, when I had a sudden breakthrough involving an alteration to a ritual. This was a ritual that clearly needed an alteration — it did the exact opposite of what I needed. But there wasn’t an obvious substitution of ingredient or incantation that would invert it, even after I tried a quite a few possibilities. Ultimately, I realized that a promising substitution could be made at an earlier point in the process, in the ritual that created one of the ingredients for the ritual I wanted to change. This was pretty satisfying, once it was all over. Oh, sure, during the process of futilely trying things out, it seemed like I was desperately grasping at straws. But in the light of eventual success, it seems more like the sort of tinkering and experimentation that’s entirely appropriate for an alchemist.

Seriously, when I think about it, this is a really good choice of role for an adventure game of this type. It makes sense of a lot of the sort of adventure-game activity that that you just have to pretend not to notice in most games. If a detective spends most of his investigation driving back and forth through the same six locations, re-asking people the same trivial questions, and visiting places to just scrutinize the furniture and then leave without having learned anything, it seems wrong. But this kind of repeated failure is part of the alchemist archetype, as is the unshakable faith that there is a solution, if only you can find it.

When you perform a ritual, you can generally tell when it’s going wrong. Each step produces a visible effect. If you’re doing it right, components dissolve, liquids clarify or change color, powders cling to substrates, mysterious inscriptions appear on the surfaces of things. Effects are vivid and definite. Whereas rituals done ineffectively, with the wrong components or with the wrong environmental influences, produce weak effects: the glyphs lack definition, the powders fall off and blow away, the liquids congeal into oily sludge. Even the incantations have alternate descriptions that let you know that they’re not generating the intended influences on the operation. This means there’s a bit of excitement when you do an experimental ritual correctly after repeated failure and see each step along the way happening the way it should.

Anyway, I’m pleased that experimentation of this sort is becoming a large part of the game again. In my first post, I talked about how it tutorializes the possibility of altering recipes, but after you’ve done that in the game’s first puzzle, you can go for a very long time without doing it again. For a while, I was thinking that it was a fluke, never to be repeated, and that, contrary to my initial impression, the rest of the rituals in the game were going to consist of simply following directions, the challenge being made by directions that are unclear or incomplete, requiring you to seek additional information elsewhere. And there’s certainly a great deal of that still going on, and that alone can produce a significant “Aha!” factor, when you realize that the “passive sealing” referenced in one ritual is defined in another, or that you actually do have multiple items capable of exerting a fiery influence. But there’s a whole extra level of “Aha!” when you’re not just performing the rituals handed to you, but proactively thinking of what rituals you need but don’t have. It engages with their content in an entirely different way, turns it from “What does alchemy want from me?” to “What do I want from alchemy?”

Hadean Lands: Dragons

The premise of Hadean Lands, the pretext for its puzzles, is one of adventure games’ oldest, pioneered by the likes of Planetfall. You could call it the Systems Repair story. You find yourself in a spaceship, or a space station, or a remote high-tech laboratory, or a submarine, or some other such enclosed and mechanical environment. The machines that support this artificial environment have gone catastrophically wrong, and for some reason you’re the only one around to repair and reactivate it all. The main thing that separates HL from the bulk of these stories is that it’s more up-front about all the technology being made-up.

It takes a good long time to get to the point of even contemplating repairing stuff in HL, though. I’ve spent most of my time in the game so far just trying to unlock various doors and cabinets, in order to gain access to more stuff to unlock doors and cabinets with. (I recently discovered that the game even has a special command, “doors”, to keep track of the doors and cabinets you haven’t opened yet.) But ultimate goals start asserting themselves once you finally stand in front of one of the ship’s Dragons.

The text of the game makes mention of Dragons in several places before you actually get to see one, letting the player assume that the word is literal, that there are actual scaly beasts harnessed to the ship’s systems. But, as the player character’s inner voice keeps reminding us, this is not a fantasy world, this is a world of Modern Alchemical Science. “Dragon” is just a term of art for a kind of complicated alchemical pattern, like a self-animating mandala. The ship has four of them. I know where they all are, but I’ve seen only one of them. It’s visibly wrong, anemic, virtually inactive. I have no idea how to make it right. So I guess I’ll keep on opening doors and cabinets until I do.

Finding the Dragon threw my plans for something of a loop. Basically all of the the rituals that I know but haven’t yet completed have a single prerequisite in common: Elemental Fire, which can be produced by a simple recipe involving phlogisticated gold, camphrost vapor, and a splint of burning blackwood (a fictional wood that burns at a very high temperature). Camphrost and blackwood are easy to acquire, but it took me a long time to find phlogisticated gold, due to mistakenly thinking that I didn’t have the item required to unlock a cabinet when I actually did. With that in hand, I finally had everything I needed to unlock the rest of the game — or so I thought, until I actually tried lighting the blackwood and discovered it to be stubbornly resistant, even when tossed in a kiln used for melting metals. Well, if it burns very hot, it probably needs a very hot flame to ignite it, right? And I figured that the hottest flames on the ship had to be the fiery breath of the ship’s powerful fire-breathing dragons. Well, no such luck.

Hadean Lands: Automated Actions

Just a quick post today. I keep on mentioning how Hadean Lands fills in intermediary steps for puzzles you’ve already solved, but I don’t think I’ve communicated just how extensively it does so. So, here’s a rather extreme example. It’s the output generated from the command “go to observatory”, executed immediately after a reset. In the iOS version, this can also be done by simply tapping the observatory on the in-game map. I’m putting it after the fold because it’s full of spoilers. But it’s also full of flavor, so you can use it to get a sense of the game’s sensibilities if you think you’re not going to play it.

Read more »