Quern - Undying Thoughts

The story is kind of kaka, but I'd rank all of the puzzles between good and excellent. A must play for puzzle-lovers in my eyes, highly recommended.

I've had this game for a while and just recently replayed it, and it really holds up well. I think the puzzle design is top notch. Yes, the puzzles are not integrated with the worldbuilding, but that's on purpose (the story explains why), and I genuinely don't mind that. Come for the puzzles, ignore the story. More detail: The good: - Puzzles feel great to solve - The best one is the Library puzzle, the aha moment is genuinely wonderful - Graphics are quite pretty. A bit on the muted/desaturated side, and its age is showing, but I love how everything looks even ten years on - Sound design is amazing. Easy to forget since it's unintrusive, but everything sounds pitch perfect to the world. - That moment when you reach the "endgame" and realize you're only two-thirds of the way through The bad: - The lore - No, seriously, it's genuinely awful. Please do not pay attention to it. - There is at least one puzzle that requires you to distinguish multiple colors, and there is no color blind mode. - There is at least one puzzle that requires you to hear tones, so if you are hard of hearing you cannot solve it. - Did I mention the lore? It's bad. Ultimately though I think the game succeeds despite the story shooting itself in the foot towards the end (still better than Obduction's story). Genuinely one of my favorite puzzle games of its decade. 4/5,and I don't give out fours and fives every day.

Some parts are confusing and running back and forth was driving me up the wall, a game for others but not for me

I’ve just started this soothing peaceful puzzle game on the SteamDeck. If you pick this up for the SteamDeck you’ll need to change the controller layout to a Community Layout one which uses the thumbsticks to move the cursor in the menus maybe turn off the gyro too as I found it annoying. The best layout is called “ Steam Controller Keyboard Bindings “ by Spencerhargiss. It’s the top one which is the best I found. The game starts off and you know this is a chill relaxing game you can play whilst listening to an audiobook or music though the letters you find in game are hard to read ( use Steam Magnifying -Steam button and Left Bumper ) there is a narrator who reads the letters too which is so helpful. Anyone interested in peaceful puzzle games this should be in your collection especially if you’ve played Myst or Riven as it seems like those games I’ll update this review once I finish the game and give thoughts on puzzles, pace etc

The game is not very fun and puzzles are quite unclear and obtuse. It's not fun to run around constantly checking combinations of things and (almost) blindly testing your items at different fitting slots to see whether anything will happen. The game should give better environmental clues to prevent this situation I think. I feel like the game is constantly trying to trip the player up as a way to prove it's "hard". I managed to come to a certain point in the game without looking at a guide once but a sound-based puzzle broke my patience because I apparently missed a vase that was sitting on the ground and the sound of it is slightly different compared to the one I was using. And the one I missed was the "correct" one. I feel like I can't suffer through the rest of the game anymore.

Quern is not a homage to Myst and other such games, it learns from them and surpasses them in every way. In some ways it should be expected after so much time between them but you still rarely see titles of this quality. If you are a fan of puzzles then stop reading this and buy it already.

Quern delivers on its premise but does so in a very uninspired way. It is a myst clone, down to the lore, so if you need a myst fix get it on sale. The game is set in a small island where the player walks around in search of the next solvable puzzle, which will in turn open another puzzle, etc. In this sense the game is very linear and typically there is only one open puzzle at a given time. The puzzles themselves are mostly rehashes of the most overused tropes in the genre: Connect the pipes, connect the beams, mastermind, arrange the sliding blocks, turn all the lights on but if you turn one on others will turn off, etc. This last particular trope (connected switches) appears way too many times in different forms. The rest is mostly about finding codes to locks, and thank god, some organic puzzles (more on that later) Difficulty in the puzzles is created by sheer size and by obfuscation, e.g. You need to input a code but hey the template we gave you is upside down and also you have to translate symbols and positions through a set of 16 characters (actual example from the game). This leads to too much busywork and also when something doesn't work, the player does not know whether the idea was wrong or there was an execution mistake. Get ready to draw diagrams because some of the puzzles are best approached by treating them as a math problem. The game offers a screenshot mechanic but it's not enough. Luckily there are a couple of moments where instead of abstract puzzles the player needs to notice clues from the world to actually understand what is going on and get creative with the available tools. These moments are the highlight of the game but are certainly rare. In terms of the lore, it's really hard to sell a world filled with puzzles that have nothing to do with the world itself, so the idea is that the player is "being tested(TM)", but it really doesn't make a lot of sense even when you know the full story. Pacing is also pretty weird, with the game suddenly hitting you with an enormous generic lore dump 2/3 of the way in, making it very hard to care about any of it. Also some of the hardest puzzles have some of the weakest payoffs in terms of progression/story, which makes them disappointing. In summary hard to recommend, given how much the genre has grown through the years.