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Once again, and for reasons I still can’t figure out (microstuttering, maybe?), a game causes me incredible nausea after playing for about 45 minutes. Though in this case, I’m not sure it would be worth my time even if it didn’t.
One of the first questions I think you have to ask yourself as a game developer is how your player will interact with your environment. These days, it is far easier to get a decent-looking Unreal engine environment – from more accessible editing tools to online asset stores. Unfortunately, this also means that you can decide to have a full-3D environment with much less gravitas (RIP) than such a decision would have carried ten years ago. Particularly when it comes to the puzzle adventure genre, this decision can often run counter to gameplay experience. That’s a lot of generalities, so let’s get specific: Quern should not have been a full-3D experience, though the developers made a valiant effort to eliminate many of the annoyances that often accompany the point-and-click adventure genre (technically, I suppose, not a point and click).
Starting with the positive traits: you have an in-game journal that lets you take screenshots and write notes about them. Considering my iPad sits next to me during puzzle games for exactly this purpose, that’s a pretty fantastic idea. Unfortunately, it’s let down by two points: first, there’s no way to draw in your journal with your mouse (which for puzzles which rely on abstract shapes is almost a necessity), and second you can’t both view your journal and interact with the environment at the same time (for example, to enter a sequence of symbols that you copied from elsewhere). Because of this, I ended up using my iPad anyway, which was a pity.
The other useful feature included in Quern is a highlight ability – press the alt key and interactable objects glow slightly. This is a very welcome addition as environments get more and more detailed (even Riven and Myst have this problem). Once again, however, there are a couple problems: you have to keep it pressed while you run around the not insignificant play area if you want to quickly scan for the places you can use a new object. Then, you’ll often see locations highlighted for seemingly no reason either because the glow is leaking from the other side of a door or if an area will be interactable once an item moves into place. This, I think, is the first sign Quern should not have been 3D.
If Quern were 2D (or pre-rendered 3D), these highlights wouldn’t leak from other locations and you could more easily (I assume) not show inapplicable interaction prompts. If Quern were 2D, you could simply press alt once on a screen to make sure you didn’t miss anything and move on – rather than needing to hold it down as you inspect things from several angles since an object might be blocking your view. This problem is carried forward as you pick up a torch that reveals hidden writing – meaning you have to go over every place you’ve been so far to see if there’s any hidden writing on the things you’ve seen already.
More than these (admittedly somewhat minor) inconveniences, we should also ask what Quern gains from being 3D. The answer, I feel, is nothing. From the screenshot for this post, you can see that the aesthetic for Quern is, overwhelmingly, grey. Now, part of the lore is that Quern is an unchanging, timeless realm, so this isn’t truly terrible by itself. But it certainly indicates that we aren’t able to fully explore the environment because there are stunning vistas we should be screenshotting. Nor is it because there is some unusual mechanic to movement we are learning: no quantum moon here, just bog-standard walking simulator with invisible walls aplenty.
The puzzles, at least as far as I got before nausea suddenly overwhelmed me, seemed…fine. The ones I got to were pretty standard – Rush Hour, symbol matching, light bouncing puzzles, combination locks, etc.. Again, nothing terribly special. This would also be fine, were it couched in some other raison d’être – puzzles as counterpoint to combat, for example. Though the lore implies you are following in the path of another, it isn’t really baked into the game in the way it is with Legend of Grimrock 2, nor do you feel any pressure as either the player (invisible ink is slightly less interesting than world-linking books) or the character – the game even acknowledges this in one of the Steam screenshots. In the end, the lore you find early on simply isn’t as immediately engaging as Myst or the Covert Front series and the puzzles aren’t difficult or rewarding enough to keep you hunting for the next one.
Why I have I written so much? I think, perhaps, because we are still in an awkward stage of life for 3D games, and I’m not sure we will ever leave. What I mean is that 3D games may seem easy today, but they really, really aren’t. It’s been possible to make a 2D game look consistently fantastic since the SNES days – even RPG Maker games don’t look bad most of the time. Put another way: a 2D game is going to have style because it’s simply not possible to have a “realistic” look when depth is a foreign concept. With a 3D game, the natural inclination is to make things look as realistic as possible and then make them stylistic – but Borderlands is not famous because it chose to stick with realistic graphics. Even something like The Stanley Parable, which I would consider a good looking game, doesn’t shoot for realism. Not only will a “realistic” 3D game from five years ago look out of date today, but the closer you approach realism, the easier it is to break immersion with a single bad bounding box or fuzzy texture.
While I stopped playing Riven because the puzzles were requiring too much back-and-forth, I stopped playing Quern because no aspect really engaged me – or even tried to (hey, I said tried). Well, that and the nausea – but I didn’t notice that until I had stopped playing for a couple minutes. Quern certainly isn’t awful, but you should probably just play Legend of Grimrock II, The Outer Wilds, Operencia, Return of the Obra Dinn, Antichamber, or The Pedestrian (spoiler, kinda) instead.