Quern - Undying Thoughts

[Ross Scott]

Genre: Adventure

Year released: 2016

Ross's rating: Unrated

Link to game:

https://af.gog.com/game/quern_undying_thoughts

Free to play: No

GaaS: No

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[xeres]

I liked this one very much! It's a Myst-like, with an inventory. Puzzles are mostly fair and logical. The story raises some good questions about what a person can and would do given enough time - drugs is only one answer.

[NightNord]

Very good game indeed. It is like Myst, but with much better story and more modern puzzles.

[Hrathen]

Must-play for every Myst fan. Good story, great graphic, logical puzzles - what want more?

[HUBERTfromAUSTRIA]

I was too young(stupid?) for Myst but i LOVED Riven. That game gives an idea, how such games could work now days. Similar to the great OBDUCTION, i loved it very much BUT those games need bigger budgets!!!! MORE such environments! MORE Puzzles! MORE!!!!!

[biosynth8]

There are many good things to say about this game. From the technical standpoint, it‘s very well made, the graphics are fine, there are almost no bugs and everything works as it should. That‘s quite a lot for a modern game. Still, I was angry at this game most of the time while playing it. While the game is generally sound, it‘s troubled by many design choices, mainly not knowing where to stop. Less content would have done the game a serious favour.

 

First, there‘s the music. Like much in the game, it‘s very Myst-like, but lacking the more dramatic tones of that series. It amounts to a monotonous plinking all the time, everywhere. The game would have gained a lot by more silence and more ambient noise instead of this constant barrage of muzak.

 

Then there‘s the story. The idea is good in general, but the execution fails on several levels. The developers didn‘t feel confident enough to design moving character models, which is fair enough with a small team. Telling parts of the story through narrated letters is a good workaround. Telling other part through a talking, flying green orb is not. It made me feel the creators‘ inability or lack of time, while just a disembodied voice might not have. It doesn‘t help that this character is meant to gain your sympathy, but feels very hostile. It tends to appear out of the blue and starts nagging at you. At some points later in the game, it‘s also responsible for some very slow and tedious scripted sequences, combined with making you do some minor menial fetch quests. The worst part is when the game stops for a ten minute story monologue presented said glowing blob with a cave wall power point presentation. You are told all the background of the game in one overly long sequence instead of hints along your journey.

 

And in the end you don‘t even get to see what happens at all. You just have to take the characters‘ words for it. At least there‘s an ending where you are given the satisfaction of seeing the green orb sulking and muttering.

 

It also takes the puzzle island idea from Myst – but you never leave that island. Besides some rusty tunnels and a brief underwater section you are always in the same environment. Well made, but boring after some time.

There are a few good puzzles in this game. I just got the feeling that they are almost all at the beginning and then decline in quality. After three quaters it starts throwing pipe puzzles at you and requires you to play a game of Mastermind. This is also where the game starts to become just a long narrow tube of puzzle after puzzle. There‘s nothing in between anymore, every piece of tunnel is just another puzzle, no environment, nothing.

 

It would have done the game good to cut out most of the weaker riddles for some exploration – since ther are many very weak puzzles. As I wrote, you get Mastermind at one point, along with other well know riddles. On the other hand, most of them are way to tedious. Many require an ungodly amount of running around just to check what you are doing. Some aren‘t even riddles, but just list of easy to mess up chores. Brewing potions was the worst offender here, in my opinion. Many others are repeated in different difficulties, something I could have completely done without. Sometimes you get what feels like tutorial puzzles.

 

A general theme of the puzzles is, that the solutions often seem to be a bit too long to be fun. If you have to dechipher runes to enter into a doorway, you don‘t have to enter four or five, you have to enter eight or ten. This is especially infuriating in cases where you allready have the solution, but the game wants you to repeat the same process several times.

 

It seems like the developers had a serious case of horror vacui with their puzzles. The game feels like the they wanted to cram every kind of puzzle, short of crosswords and sudoku, into it. (They even inserted a joke about that, I‘m not going to spoil.) It feels like the they wanted to keep the player in the game as long as possible. But this really harms the experience in my opinion. In the end, I went from room to room hoping I wouldn‘t find another easy to sovle but time consuming and click-heavy puzzle. Quality over quantity would have been the solution - and the developers show that they can do the quality.