Quern - Undying Thoughts

...are very few, and far between. Play it slowly. Savor every moment. We don't get to go on adventures like this very often.

I'd probably give it 9/10 if I had that much resolution, but I'll round up to 5/5 stars. Nice graphics, several cool setpieces, and fun puzzles. Shockingly well polished and fleshed out for having been developed by such a small team. To me it doesn't have any of the negative connotations of being an "indie game." Many comparisons could be made to the various Myst games. Slight spoilers, but Quern sorta does the Myst 3 thing of having a story reason for most of the puzzles to be somewhat overt and there for you. Rather than the well-integrated puzzles of Riven (most of which weren't really puzzles but were part of the world that had reasons for being there and were only puzzling to the player because they didn't understand the context), Quern's story has reasons for the player to be lead along a path which is littered with puzzles and other obstacles to overcome. There are at least a handful of puzzles that aren't overly contrived and feel organic, but the majority have been crafted and staged for the player-character by the NPC that had been there before (deftly voiced by Caleb Merrick, artistcaleb on youtube). Personally I prefer Riven's style of non-puzzles, but some will prefer Quern's more puzzley puzzles. I wish the devs could have made the ending feel more satisfying for me, but overall I highly enjoyed the game. Almost all aspects are very high quality. Endgame critique (spoilers) - you are presented with an A/B choice of how to end the game, and I was wanting some sneaky third option that was going to be the more satisfying "real" ending. To me, the "bad" ending didn't seem very bad and the "good" ending didn't feel especially great, and which one you chose didn't really have bearing on the player character. So I didn't see much point in presenting a choice.

The main problems I had with this game are: - Poor performance - Weak story - The structure of certain puzzles The first issue is quite obvious: this game shouldn't struggle to reach 60 fps on a GTX 970 after lowering the graphical quality, but it does. The second one is possibly the most serious. The story is, for the vast majority, as cookie cutter as it comes. The two opposing forces in the game are incredibly bland, and there's no flavor to anything. I get that part of the theme of the game is how this world slowly whittles away at you, but you never get the impression that anybody who got here wasn't already a wet bread sandwich to begin with, and by the time it's over you just wish they'd stop talking and let you solve puzzles in peace - and it's unfortunately where most of the exposition happens. The third issue is harder to explain. Most of the times I got stuck it wasn't because I couldn't solve a puzzle that was presented to me, but because I either didn't know where exactly to look for the next puzzle, or whether I had all of the pieces required. Overall I think the game required better signposting in some areas, and they should have just reduced the number of items to pick up and stuck closer to the Myst formula. Another, considerably smaller, nag is that the great feature to take notes with screenshots is ruined by the filter they decided to apply to the screenshots making them at times hard to read. Beyond these issues, the game is actually really good. Some of the puzzles, especially one with teleporting crystal towards the end, are especially well thought out and fun to figure out. I hope the developer gets to make a sequel that irons out all of these issues.

Grey boring world with very basic graphics/effects that doesn't really invite you (at least not me) to explore it. Puzzles get pretty hard a little bit in, and some puzzles (reading guides) doesn't explain the logic at all so I don't know if it's just bruteforce pressing some buttons in the correct order or what, but I don't feel like continuing after first couple hours. You often don't know what to do - you find stuff all over the place that you can't do anything with, and no real guide as what you are supposed to do, so theres lots of running around (in this uninspiring world) trying to find what the game wants you to do right now. Game is pretty demanding too, even though it has "cheap graphics" and simple effects.

This game is very close to Riven. Despite linear gameplot it very good. Puzzles are reasonable complicated (not to easy and not to hard). I like it even more than recen Cyan Firnament.