A word of advice: if you're playing it on the desktop, use a desktop wiki or something to keep alchemical notes in order. There's a lot of cross-referencing, and the interpreter's screen fills up like whoa. I'm replaying it right now without the wiki (I'm at work and forgot to sync) -- it's hard and more than a little annoying. (I screwed up the first time around: I wanted to get the most content out of my favorite character and did exactly the opposite.)

I actually ended up getting the iOS version to test out the dictation capabilities, and I see what you mean regarding the cross-referencing. The game interface probably could use a bit of tweaking, as even on the first puzzle it was pretty annoying to keep on going between the interpreter and the alchemy notes -- especially when the iOS keyboard covers the menu.

Do you know if there are any public wiki's made for the game yet? A quick search engine check didn't net me much in the way of a full resource for the game. But then, I guess using a pre-made one would inevitably lead to some spoilers... so perhaps I'll just go through it as presently designed.

Nope, there's only the html walkthrough which will eventually contain a guide to alchemy. Currently, it has a list of traits which have to be researched one at a time and aren't recorded anywhere, so it's kinda handy if that part of the game annoys you (I liked it -- it was fun to discover a new/unusual/creepy trait -- but I played on the desktop) -- but it's obviously spoilery.

All in all, Andrew Plotkin made a big deal of Hadean Lands being an iPhone game which wouldn't ever have a publicly sold desktop version because ah, iPhones are naturally made for IF and desktops are just so inconvenient -- one would think he'd make a game that's actually easier to play on a mobile device than on the desktop. Sigh.

Oh!
If your device is specifically an iPad, you should probably play Blood and Laurels.

It's been quite a while since revisiting this thread.

I still love text parsers, but having dabbled a bit with the development side as well as sampling a lot of the older as well as new implementations, I have a greater appreciation for what goes into such a system and can understand why many devs choose not to go this route.

One recent game in particular I think would have benefited tremendously from a text parser interface is The Talos Principle. It took me a while to get into the swing of the game and I still think the overall flow of the game is kind of grindy and tedious, but the meta-game and interactions with the computer terminal AI kept me engaged. Unfortunately, even though they show a keyboard onscreen and the natural inclination is to start typing out responses, there is absolutely no keyboard input allowed which breaks a lot of the immersion for me -- how cool would it have been if you could interact with the terminal using your keyboard? I understand it does present significant problems as no current chat implementation is capable of providing the sort of response which would be required... or at least, in lieu of the magnitude of actually creating a sentient chatbot, the task of creating a system that provides a workable illusion of sentience/consciousness is no small task. However, as the themes of the game basically revolve around the idea of defining consciousness, so some sort of interaction like that would have vaulted the game into some pretty revolutionary realms.

Bump for Starship Titanic being added to GOG!

I think this game in particular is a pretty noteworthy/pioneering use of a text parser in a chat sort of setting. I'd love to see modern games attempt this as opposed to only multiple-choice responses.

I grew up on text parsers and the only reason people don't like them today is because they're stupid. Really. If you can't read and write- you're going to be frustrated. You also have to be capable of thinking on your own. If you can't create a sentence or think about how to construct one to do a given action- you're not going to like it.

It taught me how to read and write though, and I'm fairly certain it gave me a massive advantage in language that remains with me to this day.
Not to mention the air of mystery and discovery it brings. It's the next best thing to a book.

Sierra Online FTW.