Dimhaven - The Lost Source

This is how a puzzle game should be! Great puzzles and storytelling. The only thing I’m missing is more of it. xD

Dimhaven is, at its core, a puzzle game. The world and plot are intriguing enough to keep you moving forward looking for the answers to the heart of the story, but while "story rich" as a category is technically correct, very little of the engaging parts of this game rely on understanding the story, characters, and world in a meaningful way. However, if you want a game that has a variety of types of puzzles, each more difficult to solve than the last, then this is an excellent game. 8/10 puzzle game. --- Spoilers Ahead --- Walking/running around to different interact-able objects is done well, and the journal/photo/sketching mechanic is a mystery/puzzle-lovers DREAM COME TRUE. Bravo to the journal system. The music is quite enjoyable, and while the voice acting is a bit "eh" at times, overall I very much enjoyed that the game was voice acted. But there's a constant disconnect between the puzzles that are presented and the world/environment around you. Act 1 is VERY strong on all fronts. You have a clear objective, and all of the puzzles fit very nicely into the logic of working towards that objective. It very much feels like you are navigating through an abandoned but well-established system. It's oozing with "this was a lived-in space, but something happened to make the people here abandon it. The mysteries and questions posited in Act 1 are juicy. Unfortunately, Act 2 follows Act 1. Act 2 seems to disconnect from the setup in Act 1. You meet a single person in "Kishvar", which is very hard to tell if it is still an operating town/village that is hanging on by a thread, or a village that is self-sustaining and doing fine while the citizens ignore some larger problem (missing people posters everywhere, mysterious happenings). It was really jarring seeing an actual 3D model of another person after going all of Act 1 without seeing another soul and with the writing on the wall being "this island is abandoned". The puzzles are okay - I have a bone to pick with the notation clues for Generator B - but it's a small escalation in difficulty from the puzzles in Act 1 which was well-placed. Act 3 was honestly quite enjoyable. Investigating Zack's Mansion which felt very lived-in was a great change from Act 2. The puzzles were decent (I know there's the card game puzzle that throws everyone for a loop, but I thoroughly enjoyed that deductive puzzle). I struggled a lot on the last puzzle of Act 3, but only because of the bug where when you write on a photo all of the writing starts squishing together. There's a lot of notes to make for the last puzzle, and having to start over twice was a PAIN. I had to use the hints to solve it because it got so frustrating. Act 4.... definitely existed. By this time I could tell that the puzzles (which I thought hit peak balance between challenging and interesting in Act 3) were only going to get more obtuse as I kept going. Every other puzzle flipped-flopped between "enjoyable/interesting idea" and "obtuse for the sake of being obtuse". Several times during Act 4 I thought I had for-sure solved a puzzle, only to have the "correct" answer be something VERY similar, but with a minor tweak or technicality that is poorly implemented. The last puzzle of the game suffers horribly from this. I loved the idea of matching a the symbols and frequencies, but it was a horrendous experience testing out a million combinations of "is this pixel-perfect frequency the right answer or not". I must have tried 20 or 30 different frequency combinations for the 2nd pattern that were all VERY close to the symbol I needed, only to find that the 3rd number for it wasn't in the 1.3-2.3 range but instead 8.3. The symbol looks extremely close on the other side of the spectrum, and because the symbol was so close I didn't even think to try a different magnitude for any of the numbers. Overall, this is an enjoyable game and I would recommend it. The hint system is, in my opinion, VERY good. Having a tiered hint system for each puzzle was very helpful to make sure I was on the right track with what I was supposed to be doing (which wasn't often, as the game typically gate-keeps you from backtracking which is both a boon and a bane). I was extremely confused at multiple points in the game where it felt like I left each Act with unvisited areas... I'm not sure if the "interact-able locks without keys" were just red-herrings to make the gameplay area bigger than it actually was, but at worst I was doubling back way more often than necessary to interact with things that served no purpose. A little conflicted with that, cause it makes the world seem bigger, but also like I was robbed of stuff to explore. I will be recommending this to people who enjoy puzzles, but unfortunately I won't be recommending it to people looking for a mystery to uncover unless they really want a difficult puzzle game to wade through between nuggets of mystery. I still enjoyed my time in Dimhaven (and will be checking out other Zadbox games as a result). Thank you for making this game.