Dimhaven - The Lost Source

Ich wollte erst knapp einen Daumen nach oben geben.. aber sorry, das geht einfach nicht. Diese matschige Pixelgrafik wäre schon vor 10 Jahren glatt durchgefallen. Was soll das? Ich gebe zu: Die Erwartungshaltung war wegen des genialen Vorgängers extrem hoch. Bei Quern passte einfach alles. Grafik, Rätsel, Steuerung, Story - eine glatte 10. Es wurde zwar vereinzelt von Bugs berichtet, die traten bei mir allerdings nicht auf. Ich habe vor allem wegen der super Grafik und der schwierigen, aber immer logisch nachvollziehbaren Rätsel einen entsprechenden Nachfolger erwartet. Aber statt Champions League bekamen wir dann mit Dimhaven eher Kreisklasse. Was für eine Enttäuschung! Der einzige Lichtblick sind die halbwegs passablen Rätsel. Deutlich niedrigeres Niveau als in Quern - aber immerhin logisch. Aber leider reicht das allein heute nicht mehr. Mit einer etwas ansprechenderen Grafik hätte es knapp für einen Daumen nach oben gereicht. Aber so? Sorry, leider von mir keine Empfehlung.

Everything has been covered by other reviewers, I really wanted to give this a thumbs up, but the egregious ending was the final nail in the coffin. I get that they couldn't get a kickstarter going, but at this price point it's not worth. My main reason for dislking is because this game had so much potential. I genuinely mean that, I believe they could have made something incredible here and they squandered it. Sounds like a backhanded compliment but its a kudos to the devs, please don't stop making games. - Far more shallow puzzle design than Quern - Voice acting (and writing) detracts from the experience - third "act" has serious quality issues, shows lack of playtesting/QA - story resolution is nonsense

I like the game except for one thing: it's core mechanic is one-puzzle-at-a-time. If you get stuck on a puzzle, you can't do anything else; you can't explore or attempt any other puzzle until your current challenge is solved/completed. For me, that's just not fun.

It's OK at best, but it was VERY long awaited and did not live up to what I expected for the sequel to Quern. The graphics were iffy on max settings - all characters and most set pieces looked like they were rendered on an early 2000's PC. Some textures were beautiful, but it was very jarring when the crappy textures came in (often). The puzzles were also pretty uninspired compared to Quern. They were either too easy or way too hard with unhelpful hints. And the plot is a complete flop. If you liked Quern, this is will be disappointing to you.

Unfortunately, after playing through this, I can't recommend it and am a frankly shocked at the good reviews (though more on that later, as reading through them, I think they're a little less positive than they first appear). While the game looks beautiful and the voice acting is just fine, I think the game gets a little carried away with this idea it's very clever and the puzzles are difficult so it's a good game. They are difficult, but sadly, there's a difference between puzzles that are difficult because they are challenging, and puzzles that are difficult because the internal logic fails. This game's puzzles mostly fall into the second category, and frankly, all of them after arriving at The Manor do. I f you have to shove all your narrative through-lines into the hint feature, you've gone awry in your game design. I love difficult puzzle games, one of my favorites was Lorelai and the Laser Eyes, a beautiful, esoteric game filled with randomized puzzles that were incredibly challenging but rewarding. I also play so many of these types of games and enjoy all the various flavors in which they come, from more story-centric games to realistic ones like Painscreek (one of my favorites) to wackier stories and formats. This game was a convoluted narrative mess set in a criminally underused setting, a story that meandered between sci fi, mystery, and drama, and so many inconsistencies that playing it was super frustrating. I'm not saying games can't have bits you don't like, all of my favorites have puzzles or sections I dread upon re-playing, but when the frustrations with the UI, the logical inconsistencies of the puzzles and the confusing narrative all barrage you with a pixelated style that is so, SO hard to read (every puzzle game now has the "read" option that presents an accessible and cutesy-font-free version of hand-written texts, where was that?) You put a hearing impaired option and let's not lie, it's only because that one "puzzle" was absolutely absurd and you have to hand-hold the player via turning on an accessibility setting. If not for the bad puzzle design, you wouldn't have had the "hearing impaired" mode, and that means it is not for accessibility reasons. Have accessibility options because people need them, not because you hurried a game through development or whatever happened there and had to shoehorn in a way to solve a logical mess of a puzzle. (I hated that, can you tell?) If your game needs to tell the player to turn on the hearing impaired mode for an answer to a puzzle, you need to redesign the puzzle and remember what accessibility options are [i]actually for[/i], because if you did that, you'd have one for the text documents. Some of which you could keep, by the way, and some of which you had to photograph. Sometimes keys were automatically inserted into things, sometimes you had to equip it for that to happen, good luck deciding which is which. The convoluted UI was frustrating because everything was frustrating. To be clear, I did play the game to the end, and would say it takes a noticeable, sharp decline after the first two sections (so, when you get to the manor). One thing I've noticed about the reviews is that most of them are "recommend, but...", so take a careful read-through of what the reviews are actually saying, here. Most of them will praise the graphics, the art, the voice acting, and the music, all of which...yeah, sure, those were fine. As I said, I really enjoyed the setting and the music was great. Even the positive reviews, I've noticed, refer to frustrations with story, puzzles and mechanics and that's...what actually matters in games of this sort. Pretty music and art aren't going to make me recommend a game if the mechanics, story, and user interface are as frankly lazy as these. These puzzles are not difficult, they're convoluted and needed several, several more rounds of playtesting. The UI needs an overhaul, you don't need that many screens to click through, you don't need the camera, and for the love of god, accessibility features are for ACCESSIBILITY, not because your puzzle design is weak. If you want a linear story that locks you out of progression until you do one puzzle, fine, but the puzzle needs to give you the clues, and the hint system needs to gently lead you to the one missing piece, not four paragraphs that were clearly meant to be in-game narrative through-lines. This was a frustrating gaming experience and most of that is because of the back half of the game. The charm and potential (even the humor) gets lost behind what feels like one of those escape room simulators, but not a good one. The puzzles do not build on each other, which in a linear game is ?????, and the story was so unnecessarily convoluted that I kept wondering why it WASN'T just an escape town with pretty background music. If you like games like this, there are plenty that improve on every aspect of this mess in just about every way. Better stories, more unique mechanics, a cleaner UI and QOL accessibility features, and just a way better experience for your money. I don't mean to be so negative but I'm legitimately shocked and kind of annoyed at the positive reviews here, maybe it's my gameplay history but this is a very weak, unfinished and frustrating attempt at a game, of which many better options exist. Find one of those and give this one a miss.

This is a hard review to write, not because there is anything wrong with the game but just because I have some mixed feelings. I really love Quern, there is something about it that keeps drawing me back. Even more so than titles that originally drew me into the genre. I routinely re-play Quern every year or so like watching re-runs of an old favourite TV series... You need to space it out enough that you have forgotten the finer details, but you also want to relive it as often as possible. It is comfort food for the brain. Dimhaven's atmosphere (as a whole) has similar promise, but I have also just 100%ed it in 9 hours. To be fair, I played the demo as soon as it was released and remembered a good number of the puzzles in the first section so maybe quoting the time spent is unfair. That said, I think it gives a decent representation of the scale in comparison to previous works. The puzzles are logical and satisfying to solve. This is a puzzle game and so that is a massive accomplishment. As other reviewers have mentioned, they make the puzzles genuinely difficult, however, achievable once you understand the premise. That is not to say I didn't bash my head in frustration whilst working through problems, but again that is all part of the process in puzzle games that modern games are often too scared to put players through. There is no real satisfaction without struggle. Zadbox clearly understood the mission and playtested it well. For story, it is not as compelling as some others. The first act (from the demo) could be described as a bureaucracy simulator... Get the visa machine to accept you past the border... Whilst it is important to pass the border to continue it's not exactly high fantasy... (no slight on the puzzles contained within that section… that said, I was sure I had to electrocute the gull both in my demo run and this one). The other elephant in the room for me is the art style. There are a number of pixel art games that I love and have sunk serious hours into. The common link among them is that they are 2D games. Pixel art in 3D (IMHO) is a huge miss. Both in the demo and the full game playthrough it genuinely hurt my eyes at times (as in eye strain). I completely get that this game is made by a tiny team and there must be an element of knowing you can't compete with 300+ person teams for graphic fidelity/texture design. Completely empathise with that, but you are using Unity, which can make beautiful games without needing *as much* dev work as larger studios spend on home grown engines. It was super jarring/annoying at times when there were posters on walls that were completely illegible right up close, until you clicked on the icon… that also breaks immersion for me. All of the above considered it must be incredibly difficult for a genuinely Indy studio to balance investing the effort in beautification, design, story, voice acting and ultimately the time it takes for production against expected returns. I suspect there were some 'lessons learnt' after Quern that swung the pendulum in this direction. A humble request from a fan would be to (in the art design at least) swing that pendulum back towards Quern (or centre at least). For the Devs, Bravo, finding that balance is incredibly difficult and I respect your efforts to commit to the project at all. When you release your next game I will wishlist it and almost certainly buy it. That is the result of trust earnt to date. For fellow gamers, I did enjoy this game. Support a small studio, buy and play through the entirety. Provide some feedback so that when you buy the next game from the studio it is even more honed on what you are after. And also, go and buy Quern too, it is genuinely one of my favourite puzzle games to date. Thanks again for the challenge and I hope to see more from Zadbox soon

To sum it up, the game is great until the final part where the puzzles become pretty tenuous and difficult. It requires you to do more than just take a picture for later, you'll be trying to figure out one puzzle whilst having clues for 3-4 at a time. This is also whilst you clock all the clearly puzzle related items and keep a track of those until they're necessary for when the puzzle comes up. Whilst trying to figure out the puzzle you're currently stuck one because you must complete them in order to unlock the next area, item, or story. The last 1/4th of this game and it's puzzle ruin the entire experience. There were a like 2-3 puzzles prior to this that were difficult due to not really pushing you in the right direction and hoping you stumble across it (such as part 2's engineering section). It isn't just "here's a puzzle, solve it" it's "oh no, you need to keep moving the story... best get hunting!". Which I don't mind, you get into a rhythm and a train of logic but it takes away from the problem-solving aspect. So between that and the raising stakes/difficult of the puzzles as the game progressed what was a fun yet challenging experience became boring and frustrating. I really gave up by the end, when I brute forced my way to the ending and reverse engineering the solution from the answers I was disappointed with what was expected and the assumptions of the devs that you'd even think of that or even track that. Finally, with how much information you need to keep track of the picture/notebook system was awful. It felt like a slog to open your journal, then to wipe your way to the last page where your pictures were. Only being able to hold one at one. When I have to open a program or grab a pen and paper to track information in a game when either the game lacks a feature, or the feature to track said information is bad then that's the sign of poor game development. I'll give kudos to the atmosphere, voice acting, story, graphics/art direction and music. All superb, but the game and gameplay was bad. I'd give the game a 4/10. That entire last section needs to be reworked, and the picture/journal system needs entirely overhauling.

The graphics for this game are truly beautiful. The pixel-textures are done so well that at times I forget and see only a detailed rendering of an environment. There is something deliciously old school about how this game is built. The atmosphere is solid, supporting well-executed puzzles that are challenging, but not impossible. Each puzzle feels grounded in a practical need, rather than esoteric or shoehorned in, and each can be implemented quickly once solved. At times the game even traps you in certain locations, forcing you to find the clues where you are, rather than getting distracted by all the possible places they could be. The game's short length (about 9 hours) also is to it's benefit, as it never overstays it's welcome or makes you question why you are getting derailed from the mission that brings you to the island. That said, without giving spoilers, I was somewhat disappointed by the end as I feel that it left more questions than answers--questions that I'm not sure will ever be resolved. I could have accepted one or two more locations that served to expand the lore. In the end, this was a strong puzzle adventure game with a beautiful art style. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who likes the genre and grew up with games like Myst or Riven.