Dimhaven - The Lost Source

As a huge fan of puzzle games (having completed "The Room" and "The House of Da Vinci" series, as well as "The Talos Principle" and titles from the "Myst" saga), I started this title with great enthusiasm. I really enjoyed the game for most of the adventure: the plot hooked me, the mysterious atmosphere with its fantasy undertones was excellent, and the complex puzzles scattered throughout provided just the right level of challenge. Unfortunately, the experience takes a nosedive once you enter the mansion. Specifically, from the "Kitchen Circuit Puzzle" required to access the laboratory onwards, the gameplay becomes unnecessarily tedious. The puzzles cease to be stimulating and begin to require absurd or overly convoluted leaps of logic, becoming merely annoying. This final section proved so frustrating and unsatisfying that I was forced to finish the game with online walkthroughs at hand. Even the sci-fi ending, while interesting on paper, feels rushed and abruptly cut off, offering no real sense of satisfaction. I truly regret having to leave a negative review, as the game showed great promise, but the final act unfortunately ruined the entire experience.

ugh I really wanted to love this. it had me until the last 25%. pros: it had a great art direction, lovely music, really good concept and story, and well done voice acting. cons: it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loses it in that last part. my GOD the puzzles became so grueling and insufferable that it ruined the whole experience. i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. i felt too stupid and it lost the cleverness of the puzzles in the first 75%. i genuinely was so done lmao.

I don't normally judge a game based on its visuals, because I tend to care more about whether a game's art style is consistent than what that art style is (and when I do think a game looks ugly in a way that I know beforehand is going to bother me, I just don't buy it). But for Dimhaven I'm making an exception because of how what the actual visuals of the game are is obfuscated in the images on the store. So... Here's the thing... There's certain choices you have to make as an indie studio with a limited budget about how you're going to have your game look since you don't have an inifinite budget and in the visual design of Dimhaven Zadbox has certainly made [b]a choice[/b]. The choice in question is, apparently, to have everything in the world is covered in pixelated texture, except for some objects, mostly ones you're supposed to examine closely and read text off of, that have HD, unpixelated textures. This, in and of itself, would not be an issue, but different objects have pixels in different sizes from other objects. It ends up with a look most people will have only encountered while playing modded Minecraft with an HD texture pack that only had HD textures some of their mo…

Wide variety of puzzles and an intriguing storyline. I had a lot of fun with this game!

A difficult review. TL;DR I would recommend it, but only at around £10/$12 The game is a good puzzle game, with the puzzles all falling into the logical and reasonable rather than random or nonsensical. A few are less puzzles and a bit more trial and error in nature, but most require a bit of thought. It also fits neatly into other classics of the genre like Myst, with its complex problems and limited handholding. The later bit of the game feels a little cumbersome, with some fairly rushed lore, and a lot of back and forth with some need to await some traversal animations, and it feels like you are forced into this for no real reason. Its not bad, just could have used some more space and better traversal options. The main negative for me was the plot, which never felt like it ever really got properly explained. There is a bunch of things you are just expected to take on face value as being normal, which would be fine, if you weren't then supposed to be aware of some things that weren't normal. Telling apart things that both seem unusual in reality is hard. Secondly this game is short....like really short. At 6-10 hours it massively fails my £1/h entertainment test, inde…

VERY GOOD VERY NICE