Inside it, time does not flow normally: people do not age, nothing dies naturally, and you can spend billions of years there without one second passing elsewhere. It was rumored to contain secrets of great power and wisdom. Long ago, a race of people called the Dulmarians had a legend about this world they called Gwan Quer’nelok. And the game only concerns itself with, and takes place on, one such world. There’s no way to and from a particular world except via an ancient gate. It’s not like Stargate, where the portals take them to faraway reaches of the same space rather, they would be transported to entirely new dimensions. The game takes place in a universe where multiple worlds are connected in the “worldchain.” People can use mysterious ancient gates to travel between worlds. I don’t think this game is well-known enough for me to assume you are all familiar with the story. But it’s such a nice, clean example that I hope by writing about it we might see how any story can be improved by examining how we present choices to a player. Quern is hardly the only game in which the story’s payoff falls flat.

Whatever spoilers you see from this point are on you. If you haven’t played Myst and don’t want the ending spoiled, you had 26 years to catch that train.Īlright, that’s enough of a warning. If you haven’t played Quern, I recommend you go buy it and play it now. And because Quern is heavily inspired by the Myst series I will be using those games as comparisons in a few places, so I’ll be spoiling the stories for those, too.

I will do my best to not reveal puzzle solutions, but everything else is fair game. Naturally, I will be spoiling this game in its entirety. Having said that, I’m going to dedicate this entire post to nitpicking. That’s too bad because it’s a really good game. I wasn’t even aware of this game until I got it in a Steam recommendation and it seems to have flown under the radar. I don’t normally write reviews on this site, but I recently played Quern: Undying Thoughts and I had some thoughts of my own.

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