Hey, it's an old-school text adventure game, like from 1977! But it's also from an alternate universe where we actually spent the intervening forty years refining text adventures as a medium!

Because it turns out we kind of did. Our universe is a big place.

(Note: I actually played through this in its initial pre-Steam release, so much of this review is based on that edition. This Steam release adds a lot of the quality-of-life features that the iOS release had, and they are very welcome indeed.)

In one sense, the setup is pretty "normal" for an adventure game. You are a novice (so the player will learn as the character does) who is stranded (giving an obvious motivation and win condition) on an abandoned (no complicated social interactions to model or interfere with) magical (lots of neat ways to influence the world) environment.

In the other, the magic system here is alchemy, and the ritual system is extremely rich and complex. It also turns out to be a lot more fun to actually type out RECITE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE and INVOKE SIMPLE SEALING WORD and such rather than just pushing a button to make it happen.

Well, once. The rituals are all neat, but once you've proven you know how to do something, the game has an extremely sophisticated AI that will allow repeating a goal, a command like PERFORM KITTEN DUPLICATOR SYNTHESIS or GO TO BRASS COIN will execute all the intermediary steps for you. This is a game where your options grow as your knowledge does, and after you, the player, have decided on a plan, you may end up uttering a command that turns into over a thousand sub-commands. That frees you up to work on the puzzles themselves.

And those puzzles are quite meaty. It took me a couple pages of notes and a week of evenings to fully solve the game, and even revisiting it a year and a half later my memory has become hazy enough that a replay hasn't been entirely trivial. That said, this edition does seem to be a bit clearer about a few bits that I remember getting stuck on last year.

There's a fair number of text games on Steam now, but there's never really been anything quite like this.