Quern - Undying Thoughts

In spite of not being able to recommend this game, it is very well done and will definitely be appreciated by a select audience. It is in the Myst genre, with beautiful and imaginative graphics and lots of gears and buttons. The story is fine, with two possible endings, each which ends on a positive note. But the puzzles - they are a deal breaker. I'm not a novice to this type of game, having played everything from Zork to Myst to The Witness, but this one really stretched the limits of difficulty. Many of the puzzles are easy enough to solve, but some are difficult to the point of being impossible for most players to get through. I venture that 90% of players who finished it had to resort to a walkthrough at some point. While I guess all puzzles were logical once solved, in the sense that you can go back and see a clear path to the solution, before being solved, the path was anything but clear. A reasonable puzzle should have the necessary components either at hand or in an obviously related location. In this game, there were parts all over the map, switches that need to be thrown somewhere else, and effects of the solution on the other side of the island. In some cases I would s…

Awesome, totally reminds me of Myst and Witness and others. If that is your thing, this is fun. The puzzles are enjoyable. Also, they do become challenging. It isn't extremely challenging, but just right. In other words, it does make you think about how to figure them out and not obvious right away. A lot of fun. Nice CG / art. The team that put this together did a great job.

Not the Myst You're looking for Quern Undying Thoughts is a Myst like game, meaning that you are here to solve puzzles. The setting is even very similar, taking place on an insular island that is cut off from the rest of the world, and the story has similar beats with differing ideologies surrounding the powers this island has. Unfortunately, I found a large portion of the puzzles in this game to be more tedious than interesting, and I found a lot of "puzzles" simply required me to remember minute details from sections I hadn't visited in a long time, making progress very difficult. The difficulty in solving puzzles, and the requirement to have a near eidetic memory may appeal to some, and if it appeals to you, go for it. Outside of the puzzles annoying me and not feeling worth it, they are competently done, so this isn't an awful game, simply not one I would recommend. The main issue is that I found most of the puzzles to be more about going from one area to another, making sure to pick up all the little items, and slapping them where they are meant to go. This means that if you happen to miss a little detail, you'll be running around trying to figure out what to do a…

Great game! Completely Myst-like, maybe not quite as atmospheric, but still excellent all the same. Runs fine on my low-power work laptop with Iris XE graphics. 6.5/7 would recommend.

It was a great game. Reminiscent of Myst. There were some very challenging puzzles but I think it was fairly balanced. As you play, there is foreshadowing yet its subtle so much you don't even know its happening until after you got past that area. Then you go, O I C! Some of the puzzles were fantastic. I haven't had this much joy with a puzzle game since The Room and Davinci's House. I hope the developers keep going and make another one just as engaging. My only complaint is the save system. I think you need to redo how that is going to be solved. My save files got all corrupted on PS5. I had to start over, and I decided to start over on PC instead. And then I saw the "save" system. I can see how they got corrupted now. There is not an individual traditional save file. I think the journaling system might have something to do with the corruption.

Best Myst clone I've played to date. Really long gameplay, seemed to just go on and on. Liked the game design and art. Good stuff!