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.
