Quern - Undying Thoughts

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.