You know those Steam reviews where they've played 3000 hours and then give it a thumbs down? I finally understand how they feel. This game is made for me, and I love it a lot, but I also hate it a lot and I absolutely can't recommend it.

The decision to make this an always-online MMO-lite is ruinous. The servers can't cope, and you keep getting lagged out of position, which is a killer when so many puzzles are based on accuracy or dexterity. I had to stop playing for a month when the server just refused to let me in. I'm also certain they've got the min specs wrong - my computer is within the min specs (if not the recommended specs, admittedly), but I had to turn the graphics all the way down, which makes some of the puzzles in the recent Archipelago of Curiosities update impossible because the object I need to target is being automatically culled.

If not for all that, this would be one of the best puzzle games ever made. The variety is fantastic, and the sheer amount of puzzles scattered around make this compulsively playable. The set-piece Enclave levels are cleverly constructed, with a few good gimmicks peppered through them, and the Mysteries (post--game challenges which usually require you to hunt down and solve a previous puzzle with a new set of rules) really make me appreciate that puzzle design is an art. Not all the puzzle types are winners (sorry, Morphic Fractals), but the good ones are really good. Logic Grids, styled after Japanese logic puzzles, are the clear winners, but Pattern Grids and their lateral-thinking solutions are delightful too.

I feel sorry that the publisher closed the dev studio. I don't think any of this was the devs' fault. All this needs is an offline mode, really, and then it can be fully appreciated.

Yes it's a Myst-like, and a pretty good one too. It's not just cribbing ideas from Myst, but feels like it's in conversation with Myst. If you were ever bothered by how Atrus is positioned as a good colonialist (who's still finding new worlds and ripping up their resources to build his own machines and change them irrevocably, but he means well so that's alright), then Quern feels like a deconstruction of that idea, following the train of thought to its terminus. I won't say the plot is brilliant, but it is trying to do something interesting with its influences.

Puzzles are pretty good, on the whole! Quern promises reusable puzzle mechanics, and those are the best of the bunch - they have that Metroidvania quality of getting a new toy and having your mind run through all the places you could try playing with it. A handful of Myst-like big-machine puzzles and a few stock logic puzzles are thrown in for variety. They're not always integrated plausibly, but they're appreciated.

The puzzle structure is very linear. Quern gets away with this in the first two thirds of its runtime as you run around the whole map reconfiguring it with every new reveal, but slips up with an endgame that feels more like an obstacle course than an actual place.

This charmed the hell out of me. It never would have occurred to me to combine the Sierra Dr. Brain games with a Rareware-style collectathon, but it works and it's really fun.

This is mostly about solving puzzles to collect batteries (and other objects) to get further into a mansion to collect more batteries. The puzzles are mostly from the standard library - you've got your Towers of Hanoi, you've got your cryptograms, you've got your slider puzzles (well, no game's perfect). There's a few new ones too. This is the first game I've played with Punnett Squares and chemical equation balancing.

Difficulty is customisable for most puzzles, and you can spend hint chips to get partial solutions (or full solutions if you spend enough). There are enough batteries that you can outright skip puzzles if you're not a completionist. This is a really generous attitude to puzzle design which is perfect for a game like this.

The game's not perfect - it's a little buggy, some of the music is challenging to listen to for a long time, and some of the reference humour is eye-rolling. But damn it, it's got heart, and it's fun, and some of the other jokes are really good, and the endgame sequence is one of the best I've seen in a puzzle adventure game. It's bonkers. I love it.