Dimhaven - The Lost Source

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.

Fun and complex puzzles, definitely worth a play

Als je graag de games van Cyan (Myst, riven, etc...) en Quern speelt zul je dit ook graag spelen. Het is wel een vrij zwaar spel die veel RAM neemt en het grafisch gedeelte is enerzijds heel goed en anderzijds zitten er enorm veel gepixelde elementen in maar dat zijn dan zaken die eigenlijk niet zo belangrijk zijn in het spel maar ik vind dit toch een min punt. Het verhaal is goed maar soms moeilijk te volgen, vooral als je geheugenproblemen hebt zoals ik. De puzzels zijn soms goed te doen en makkelijk op te lossen maar andere zijn dan weer vrij moeilijk en vragen toch wel wat tijd om op te lossen maar dat kan gewoon aan mij liggen ook hoor ;) De prijs is wel aan de hoge kant dus ik zou het kopen als het in promotie is maar het is zeker de moeite waard om aan te kopen. Ik speel op een Imac 2020, 8-core i7 met 64GB RAM. Met een zwaardere Mac of vooral PC zul je in veel hogere resolutie kunnen spelen zonder haperingen. Ik moest het op de laagste resolutie spelen om vlot te kunnen bewegen :(

That's a great game, nostalgically smart. The cutscene-presented lore looked a bit messy, but overall i enjoyed the story, the gameplay , the music and the style very much!

J'ai apprécié l'histoire ainsi que le choix graphique du jeu. Il n'est pas très difficile, à part quelques énigmes un peu capillo-tractées, cela reste satisfaisant et n'empêche pas une progression régulière dans le jeu. Les indices m'ont été bien utiles, sans donner la solution. Bref, je recommande ce jeu que j'aurai du plaisir à refaire dans un an ou deux, comme je l'ai déjà fait avec Quern - Pensées Immortelles que je recommande chaleureusement aussi.

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.

The negative reviews make some good points and if you're thinking about playing this I recommend checking them to make sure that the harsh parts of this game are something that you can put aside for a good puzzle experience. Overall this doesn't really feel like a complete game (once again kickstarter games often don't come out with the level of polish that we would hope). I bough this after it was fully published and because of how much I liked Queren and how much I like "Myst-likes", and it definitely satisfies the itch. There is only one puzzle that I think really made me huff a lot because I thought the solution was not very intuitive, and I feel like some information was left out. Despite that, all of the other puzzles were the appropriate level of difficulty - which for me my taste means that they were hard. I don't mind the pixelated graphics, but I'm old and I tend to forgive a lot in that department. My biggest complaint was that many of the puzzles borrowed from some overdone concepts. There are a lot of great and innovative ones, but maybe 40% of them seem kind of stale and to an old hand at puzzle games my reaction was "Oh, one of these" a few times. My second complaint was the length. The game is very short and I clocked just shy of 12 hours, using no walkthoughts and only one section I used in the in game hints. It's kind of puzzle to puzzle until you are suddenly at the end. Overall, if you're a big fan of this genre you should play it, but you'll realize it's not the top of its class.