Quern - Undying Thoughts

Recommended

Bought because it was cheap on sale - cannot get navigation controls or mouse to work with any kind of logic - tedious puzzles even with text and video walk throughs - moving on...

Pretty good, has a lot of unique puzzles and an interesting story.

Of the very few negative reviews, they mostly complain about some puzzles either being idiotic and unintuitive, long travel distances due to bad map design, and having to constantly keep track of like 7 ongoing puzzles at all times. These are all true. Multiple times throughout the game I had to use a guide because of just how ridiculous this game is. I will attempt to avoid major spoilers, but I will be partially spoiling 1 puzzle due to how absurdly stupid it was. I will also list bugs and other things that annoyed the hell out of me. Obviously, I did not finish the game. First is the puzzle I want to spoil. [spoiler]There is a puzzle that involves putting jars on a disc that has 6 slots. I found no way to remove old items from my inventory so at this point you would assume that the first 6 jars you find are all you need for the puzzle right? NOPE! There are 7 jars total so if you collect the first 6 and then spend 1 hour slamming your head into a wall before using a guide and realizing there's 7, you would be a very silly person! The 7th vase also just ends up clogging your inventory until the very end of the game where you can get an achievement for placing it. Many items clog up your inventory, it sucks.[/spoiler] Multiple areas in the game have horrible ambient sound effects (namely the creaking wood), which ended up making me turn off sounds completely only like 2-3 hours in. Lots of the items you get are for items on the opposite side of the map which means you have to keep a mental map of every single unopened door, locked door/chest, unfinished objects (think matches for a candle and gears for a broken clock), and other annoying gizmos. 2 times I fell back onto the guide I was using, only to find out the reason I was stuck was because I had to go back to a completed puzzle that wasn't even hinted at, which basically means I wasted 1.5 hours of my playtime looking for nothing. The puzzle that made me incredibly pissed off and made me rage quit shortly after was a type of pathing puzzle. I got the first solution on my own, attempted the second one on my own but failed. I used the guide, compared it to the clues to see if I understood how it worked, and for the 2nd puzzle you have to put in a 2nd code so I tried what I just learnt, and then after looking at the solution for this 3rd (technically 2nd V2) puzzle for over 5 minutes, I just gave up on understanding it and moved on. Even right now, this puzzle seems idiotic and unintuitive to me, and I'm still mad about it. I had it happen multiple times where I got launched incredibly high into the sky and almost got launched into areas I shouldn't have access to yet. I literally had to strafe in the air to get back into the area I was supposed to be. I have more to complain about but it would have to be said with blatant spoilers so I won't. Riven and Myst are INCREDIBLY fun and enjoyable, I would recommend playing those a million times over before this, and even then maybe play all of "The Room" games first just to stall for time. This is graphically great with good voice acting, but I genuinely think I would rather eat rocks, not a figure of speech, literally would rather eat rocks.

Incredible puzzle game easily 10/10 for the puzzles and exploration alone

Great puzzle game! The puzzles were good although sometimes a little complex and time-consuming. I only got stuck like 5 times (which is great compared to games like Myst). The soundtrack was awesome!

Fun, if you have a machine that can handle the graphics - very cool.

I like the game overall, but some of the puzzles didn't click with me, so I just used a walkthrough for those.

Graphics are a little dated for 2026 but certainly still a good game. good voice acting, good mechanical puzzles. I definitely enjoyed it.

Dope Myst/Riven style game