Dimhaven - The Lost Source

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.