Vanished Puzzle Quest

The game is alright for a linear puzzle game, however it would not make the best inspiration for an escape room puzzle using similar instruments. Not much separating this game from a children's point-and-click linear adventure, especially since this game's description promised more: Most of the item-hint combinations make some sense for practical application, but there were plenty of instances where how the objects would have worked were incongruent for how they related to the connected puzzles. Also, the game is bugged on achievements. In theory it is quite easy to 100% the game, but the STEAM achievements list will not reflect it. From the first puzzle, I was confused on how the character knew which position to put the arm of the triquetrum to, I thought we as the puzzle experiencer would need to figure that part out. Additionally, there is no reason why the stargazer's globe should have glowed technicolor with certain glowing constellations, when a magnifying-glass-like object was held up to it. Some of the time-related puzzles (as in, the answers are hours and minutes) did not have a clear indication of how the time was supposed to be measured, despite an earlier puzzle having a guiding piece of paper that clearly illustrated how to find the time. For ALL of the time-related puzzles, there is no discernible reason why the "clocks" would snap to an arbitrary time when activated, instead of either marking the extant time of day, or starting the first minute at the moment that it activated (like a digital clock that just regained power). For an escape room, it would be more realistic to have the same device, but as a "broken clock", showing the key time without further tampering. The volumetric puzzles were broken in a physics sense. The character correctly used baskets to capture displaced water from an object, but did not drain off the remaining water that was not displaced, so you were measuring the total water's weight instead of only the weight of the displaced volume of water. A puzzle that required water to go into specific columns of water in a specific order would have done better with the three columns being varying widths, and for the water supply column to have a specific water line, where the solution to the puzzle was to adjust the uneven columns with specific water levels until the supply column's level was right where it needed to be. Because if the puzzle piece was supposed to function in real life, either the water would only be for show and the positions would be the key, or the puzzle could be solved with any combination of positions that resulted in the same water line answer. The astrolabe puzzles had very obscure instructions on how the puzzles are supposed to be solved: It was not pleasant to have four of those puzzles in a row, connected to the same hints system, which forced all of them to be auto-solved when I barely figured out the first part, and could not properly figure out the second part. There were plenty of times when the puzzles and riddles were intuitive and clever, but quite a few others where either the clues were too well hidden, or the character made leaps of logic that a more careful person would not have. All in all, this game promised a better understanding of how the devices that were the main subject worked, but instead gave illusory puzzles and a timeline of trivia. Perhaps I was expecting too much playing this game as an educated adult, instead of as an adolescent learning about the 9th-12th century Mediterranean region.