Dimhaven - The Lost Source

Прошел без подсказок. Горд собой!

It’s been a while since I played a nice fun puzzle game, and I really feel that for me Dimhaven really delivered. Everything from the puzzle design to the level design and artsyle was all very very nice in my book. The puzzles (like they warn you beforehand) are pretty darn tricky to figure out, and it felt really nice when you solved them. At the same time I did not feel like I was stuck on the same puzzle for too long either. So for me it felt like a pretty good balance. And the only two times I actually was stuck I should actually just have read the first thing that the hint button says, to look over and read what you know. As for me I had just missed small details that made me not put things together right. One of em being: [spoiler] I for a sec thought the game wanted me to tab out and look up T9 input for letters, but it was right there in a newspaper all along in game so, just a miss by me. [/spoiler] I really liked that the game was very light on the handholdy side and you were mostly left to yourself to figure things out. But that may also lead to one of the things that kinda held back the game a little for me. And that is that you kinda always only had one thing to do all the time. So very little of multiple puzzles being available at the same time, and that maybe made the exploration and like fun discovery of the adventure a little held back. You might be presented with multiple things at the same time but it was very clear that you are not able to solve that now but it will make sense soon. You know, like a little bit of The Witness would be nice where you can work on some threads here and there, and ofc that is a very different puzzle game but still. That said, even if was in many ways a pretty linear game in a sense, the level design still felt very nice. It felt good looking around and together with the nice visuals it was a very pretty experience. I don’t think this style is everyone's cup of tea it seems, but I really really liked it. Storywise, I’m a bit split. The ending kinda came a bit abrupt and it felt like maybe it was rushed. I saw an old trailer of this and it seems like some things did not make it in (maybe future game or extra content). Yet you could see kinda like traces of things that never got explored, blocked off by fences or far away that looked like it was supposed to be part of the game. So a little sad to not see that stuff, but at the same time like around 8 hours felt like a pretty good length so. Lastly I just wanna say something about the photo mechanics. A very very nice feature and it was great to take pictures of things and do little notes on top of them to figure out puzzles. I kinda would have liked a feature to be able to hold a picture in each hand so you can transfer notes when combining things for a puzzle, but it’s not too hard to just keep it in your head. That said it felt a little janky at times, with you can sometimes have a picture in one hand when looking at things but not always for some reason. Like when inspecting a code wheel at one point I could not make notes on my picture at the same time and I kinda wish I could. Also for some reason with picture in hand and like looking at a keypad if you clicked the photo you inspect it closer and then when you go back you just put away the photo instead and stand there without it in hand. If you leave the keypad you then take it up again =S. Probably not intended to happen and probably a bug that should be fixed at some point. Not sure how much you should write about bugs in reviews, but hey. At some point I also had my notes on photos start panning right after each stroke so they started hiking away from where I wrote them. It just happened once so, no clue why. After a restart it was all fine again. So all in all a very nice puzzle adventure game with some very nice atmosphere.