Dimhaven - The Lost Source

Amazing

Uitdagend!

I have played this genre since Myst and this just might be the most enjoyable so far! Only one puzzle I would consider a "miss" since it breaks consistency and required outside information. (keypad into Zack's room). The rest of them were delightful and seemed to follow consistent game rules of using provided information found nearby. No guesswork or anything convoluted. The puzzles were just the right difficulty and very satisfying. I loved the camera and note taking mechanic! Having the character we play have a real voice was great too!

very fun and interesting puzzle game, i loved the artstyle, however the story feels a little inconclusive and it wasnt worth the sale i got it on much less the full price. still a very good game and with a free post game update (even if it was a 2 hour quick flashback) it would fill in the story gaps and be worth the price 8.5/10

Fun and complex puzzles, definitely worth a play

A wonderful little game with some very very tricky puzzles. So much fun roaming around though working things out. Story was interesting and the ending was good. Sure the graphics aren't spectacular but then this is again about the content and the puzzles.

Another, "Should be a Maybe" score. Decent fragment of a puzzle game. Buy it on sale. [b]The Good:[/b] - Neat art style - Some beautiful vistas - A bit of quirky humor - A nugget of some really interesting world building. [b]The Bad:[/b] - Some of the puzzles felt more like debugging an engineering project than a game. - Criminally underused systems (Photo Challenges, the kitchen party investigation) - Hastily closed off sections with no payoff (Gate at the top of the Gondola, several locked cabinets with no way to access them) [b]The Ugly:[/b] - Too short - ... Even with some borderline abusive backtracking to pad out the clock. - Odd mixture of storytelling styles. The opening section almost feels like a fun Lucasarts adventure that didn't take itself too seriously... quickly followed by a mystery thriller with an evil... but not..(?) antagonist. - Horrifically buggy drag interaction system. Made the game completely unplayable until enabling the "Limit drag interactions" setting. Overall the game feels like they glued Act 1 and the finale of the game together, and left out the meat of the journey. Made it impossible to build a rapport with the characters and the story enough to understand the world or care what happens to it. I'm still giving this a thumbs up, but I really feel kinda cheated out what could have been a grand 30ish hour adventure.

I can definitely recommend the game, but admittedly it falls very short of Quern and the other greats of the genre. There are so few games in this genre that it's kind of a no-brainer to pick this up, but I do hope the devs can take the valuable feedback in the other critical reviews here to heart and yeah, hopefully pop off with something truly spectacular in the future. The gameplay here is so buttery smooth and fluid, it just "feels" so good to play. The world feels palpable with tons of interactables and appropriate animations. Hits - Puzzles: Most of the puzzles are fun and somewhat challenging and a lot of these puzzles are actually intuitive, which is nice. Tools: You're given a lot of note-taking tools to help you along the way, it's really cool to be able to draw colored notes on photos that you take. Misses - Puzzles: Unfortunately, there is one particular immersion-breaking puzzle in a completely different style than the other puzzles, and it makes absolutely zero sense - the game literally locks you into it by surprise in the middle of exploring and you can't do anything but look up a guide on how to solve it (or you just brute force your way through it with a hundred guesses). I'd wager not a single person actually solved this puzzle legitimately, which is really sad. I'm also sure a good portion of players rage quit at this point as well because getting locked inside such a weird gimmick for no reason whatsoever makes zero sense (it's not a physical lock, the game devs trap you inside invisible walls and force you to perform weird interactions and solve a puzzle with zero context clues). Tools: Unfortunately, the "journal" just becomes obnoxious after a few hours, after capturing 15 pages of notes, it never seems to open anywhere near where you want it to. It usually opens at the beginning and you have to tediously flip through all the pages to get to your most recent notes, so it's just easier to use a real notebook in real life for most of the puzzles... despite some of them greatly benefitting from the in-game sketching tools. Story: Yeah, it's just terrible. It's cliche and plays on common themes. The characters are forgettable. The place is super interesting as you fly in during the opening and there are a few comedy elements, but once you leave the starter area, everything goes downhill. Nothing really feels fully fleshed out. There's only a very small amount of lore to discover, which allude to only a couple of interesting things, like villagers hallucinating and solar eclipses, but we never see anything like this happen or play out. There's a bunch of posters in the starter area and it has a ton of environmental detail which makes it feel real, but the rest of the game is borderline empty, and empty of the comedy elements too. It feels like the devs spent 75% of their time and effort on the beginning area and 25% on the rest of the game, and unfortunately the starter area is 15-20% of the time you spend in the game. All in all, I enjoyed it due to the interesting, intuitive, and somewhat challenging puzzles. There's around 10 hrs of content. It's short, sweet, but unfortunately pretty forgettable. I really hope they patch out the few moments that made me want to rage quit (for real), so that future players don't have that experience.