Quern - Undying Thoughts

Really nice puzzle game. Solid feeling physics and great puzzles. The main happy surprise for me was the sheer amount of content. There is more to this game than I expected.

I’m a real fan of this game. The puzzles are relatively well-conceived and feel part of the world that’s been constructed. The hub-and-spokes layout works well as you tend to open up shortcuts that are satisfying. The graphical design is enticing, and the world feels relatively organic. I was a big fan of Myst, Riven and Obduction, and while this game feels a bit smaller in scale, it is nevertheless highly enjoyable and clearly draws on those influences. One slight frustration is that the game does not fully integrate controller input like its console version. The menu is not navigable using a controller, which kind of defeats the purpose for me, as I like chilling with this game on the TV. If I remember correctly, the developer mentioned that full controller support would be added to the PC version alongside the recent console launch, but it seems that’s not the case. Still, as you may be buying this with the preference of playing using mouse and keyboard, I still highly recommend this game. I for one bought the game again on Xbox to have my preferred experience. On an autobiographical side note, I was playing this game and idly attempting to solve one of its puzzles in one of the last telephone conversations I had with my father before he died. I sometimes feel guilty I was playing a game while chatting with him, but at the same time, there’s something comforting returning to this game from time to time as it sparks a positive memory despite the sadness.

I prefer puzzle & atmospheric games to those with lots of shooting and gore so I loved the various scenes in this game, which gave me hours of play. Some of the puzzles are maddening, though. I had a hard time with some of them because it was challenging to get the pointer in the correct place and not just mess up my last action, so there tended to be a lot of cussing at the computer on my part. I did ultimately get through the whole game to the end - there have been some other games that I've had to abandon since I just could not get the bloody pointer to do what I wanted it to, and I ended up stuck wherever I happened to be. I am also a big fan of the Myst series, and this had the same feel to it without the time limits on certain puzzles that also made it impossible for my graphics to keep up as I tried to go from scene to scene.

... moreso than Myst's actual sequels by Cyan, this game as extremely well done. If you like Myst, you'll enjoy this: - Puzzle solving at your own pace - A bare, but serviceable story (less is better in my opinion for games like these) - Puzzles find the perfect balance (i.e. not so simple that you can just "pick up the thing then put the thing in the shiny hole", but not so obtuse that you would NEED a walkthrough) In fact, I HIGHLY recommend you don't look up a single puzzle. Everything is solveable, if you just try and think a little outside the box (think of what you have in your inventory, think of where you've been, did anything change that could help now, etc). Many puzzles I'd get stuck, go take a break, and when I came back it became obvious. While Myst had "more worlds" they were all just point/click images. Quern has two fully explorable areas (I don't want to say worlds, but you'll see what I mean without spoiling anything). Surprisingly, this game crushed my computer, even though I could handle Doom 2016 (on low... to be fair), so I played this game on medium, because some of the areas are quite beautiful. Moreover, this game had MORE puzzles than Myst, and none of them felt like filler. Extremely well thought out, well paced, well designed. Well done devs. While the game still has bugs, the devs seem to be quite vigilant in fixing them. (I made a post on the steam forum (which is more lively), and the dev responded to me that same day saying he would be pushing a fix in the next day or two. Definitely pick this game up if you're an old Myst fan, or if you're new to this type of game, and are able to think critically/like puzzle solving, this is definitely worth getting.

One of the best games ever; however the difficulty notably ramps up if you play it in small sittings over a prolonged period of time. Like an expensive puzzle box, this game manages to be both elegant and have logically sound solutions. During this game I went through tens of pages of notes, and fifty screenshots of important objects. I would go as far as to say this is the most satisfying puzzle game I've played in the last five years. This game does however induce some anxiety from the lack of gating. Every puzzle can be attempted without the required parts; and for some puzzles the parts are even unavailable for the majority of the game. Couple that with sometimes precise hotspots and an almost-always expanding world; and you'll quickly start to catalog every nook and cranny to make sure you do not enter a puzzle without fulfilling all the necessary criteria.