Dimhaven - The Lost Source

this game was so difficult yet so rewarding when you figure it out there's absolutely zero handholding but there are hints if you get stuck overall just a great game.

If you like puzzle games like Myst, Quern and all the others, get this one, it hits the right spot.

Finished in just short of 20hrs. Enjoyed it quite a bit. A few bugs still in the game but they are rare (clicking on a picture on the opposite side of the wall from a guitar plays a chord; sketching on a photo sometimes alters sketches that are already there).

Nice puzzles and atmosphere. A few points had me stuck for where to go but the clues were all there in the game and the in-game hint system is good at nudging things in the right direction.

very good game, the unique artstyle and the gameplay as well as the story were very good. I hope to see this game series contunued hopefully, the endin did leave a jungle temple setting and a Alchemist setting open for us. The puzzles are sometimes easy, sometimes hard. My biggest annoyance was the final puzzle, that also sparked some discussions on the Forums, however i am sure teh devs noted that for any future titles/ games that will follow this one. 100% recommend this game, took me about 7 hours to finish. Again, hope the teasers in the end lead to new installments in this series, would love to play and see more :D

If you liked Quern, you will like this. It is better in basically every way. This is a puzzle game and I want to mostly review the puzzles themselves, so to quickly hit on the non-puzzle points: [list] [*]lead voice actress and main secondary character are excellent, other VA quality is quite mixed but never awful. [*]story/lore/world-building is very many levels above Quern. It's no Disco or 1000xResist, but it's a cool enough setting for a puzzle game. [*]art style I think is pretty cool, that's going to be personal taste though. [*]Performance was OK. I have a very high end rig and saw no issues, HOWEVER it was running at around 100 FPS most of the time when my graphics settings limit is 240. Plenty more visually intensive games run at or closer to that limit, so a lower end PC might genuinely struggle here. [/list] As for the puzzles, these are mostly good with some meh ones. Compared to Quern, this game does one thing MUCH better in my opinion: locks you into relatively limited size areas. In Quern, you basically spend the whole game where ANYWHERE on the island might be the clue you want. This meant hours running around, almost aimlessly, looking for the one tiny pixel you maybe missed interacting with and with not necessarily any obvious idea where on the island that pixel might be. Dimhaven avoids this almost entirely by having a handful of much smaller contained puzzles areas (all cohesively and narratively linked) making this particular issue massively reduced if not non-existent. A problem Dimhaven sadly DOES carry over from Quern is that sometimes the one essential thing you need to click on just blended into the environment in some really innocuous spot and you have literally no idea you missed it, even in these much more contained areas. I used my first hint really early in the game and it turns out I was staring right at the item I needed in a drawer I already opened and checked twice. I just didn't mouse over (or didn't notice the icon when I did) even though I was specifically looking for an item that matched this thing's exact description, because I knew what I had to do, I just didn't have the items yet. This is ultimately pretty unsatisfying gameplay because I am here to solve puzzles, not play a hidden item game. I personally really enjoyed the logic puzzles, and there was quite a few where I could see what I needed to do and just needed to sit down and really think about the steps to get there. The ability to take photos and write on them is an AWESOME feature! Blue Prince and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes both require giant unwieldly Google Docs (other word processing brands are available) by the end, so having this sort of thing built into the game was a really great idea and implemented well. Then there was a couple of wordy puzzles that didn't land for me. One turned out to be an ACTUAL grammar error in the VITALLY IMPORTANT CLUE that the devs confirmed was indeed an error in the discussions here. It was super disappointing to give up and use an in-game hint, only to realise I was mislead by the ACTUAL IN-GAME text. Then there was second wordy one that just did not compute to me even with the in-game hints and I just ended up brute forcing it. Maybe this is just on me and how my brain works (again, the logic puzzles always had "obvious" routes to the solutions for me) and wordy/riddle based puzzles are a natural blind spot. So credit to the designers, coming up with a range of vastly different puzzle styles and balancing them all for EVERY type of gamer is basically impossible so, overall, I am very satisfied with the puzzle solving. I also want to mention the final puzzle (no spoilers) and how it doesn't appear to have a single solution, but accepts a range... That is just an odd choice and unsatisfying to me. There's no grand "a-ha!" moment because, even if you're spot on, you're still entering your solution and thinking "I wonder if this is right?" due to the nature of the puzzle. Not a bad puzzle in itself, but the fact you can't possibly be certain about your final answer in the grand finale puzzle of the game is just a weird deflating feeling for something that is supposed to really be the highest high of the whole thing. Ultimately, I enjoyed and will definitely be watching what these devs do next as - as I said - this was several steps above Quern already, so if they keep improving then damn we've got a great future ahead as puzzle game lovers.