Zarf Updates

What a wonderful time to be a puzzle fiend!

• The Incident at Galley House
• Dimhaven: The Lost Source

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The Incident at Galley House

• by William Rous and Evil Trout -- game site

Galley House has been abandoned since 1936. Since long before that, as far as anybody can recall; but the heap of unexplained corpses that turned up in 1936 pretty well sealed the deal. But what happened back then? Your shiny new spectronoetic console might just provide answers.

Last year I reviewed the original plain-text version of Galley House:

Type Help is smart, sharply written, intensely compelling, and a great puzzle besides. I couldn't stop thinking about it until I was done, and then I wrote this post. Yay! It's good. You should play it.

-- me on Type Help, Feb 2025

Really that's all I need to say and all you need to read. Have at it.

But you may have more questions.

What kind of game is this? It is static deduction. Indeed, Type Help rapidly became one of the inspirational touchstones of that hot new genre, to be mentioned in the same breath as Golden Idol or Roottrees. Now it's been redone with (simple static) graphics and (very excellent) voice actors, ready for its Steam debut.

Is it worth playing Galley House if you've already played Type Help? It certainly was for me. The story is the same, and I remembered the basic concept well enough. But eighteen months is enough to blur the details. I still had to play -- listen to the dialogue, take notes, and deduce who was where and when. And who died where and when.

(Sure, I could have looked at my 2025 notes file. But why spoil my own fun?)

Plus, Galley House has... let's say additional material. Extended content. The story I recalled from Type Help did not cover everything I encountered in Galley House. I shall leave the details to await your arrival.

Is the additional material consonant with the original game? Yes. And, before you ask, it was all written by William Rous, the original author.

Is Galley House still basically a text game? I would say not primarily. You listen to spoken dialogue. Yes, you get text transcripts of everything you hear, browsable and searchable. When you need to recall a detail, you'll go straight to those transcripts. But it's still a distinctly different texture from the original. (Which, as we recall, was written in Twine.)

More importantly, you're no longer typing filenames at a text prompt. You're playing with a Mysterious Machine. (Yay!) Dials, levers, switches. The Machine does the same job you might remember from Type Help. But if you're new to spectronoetics, you've got an additional layer of inscrutability to contend with. There's more bits to experiment with. It's definitely a change-up from "What do I do? Oh, I guess I'm supposed to type HELP."

I am biased (by knowing the original), but I think the new introduction works. It's not meant to be a serious hump; you are provided with reasonable (in-character) instructions. Just keep in mind that while Galley House is of the Golden Idol lineage, it's not a straightforward fill-in-the-blanks quiz. There's a bit more to it than that.

Okay, enough out of me. Galley House is delicious and not a game to spoil.

I'll just add what I've been saying all along. I've played plenty of deduction-esques since the Obra Dinn came down the ways. Not all of them, or even most! It's a delightfully productive (and still delightfully indie) subgenre.

But Type Help was the real audience breakout. For a few weeks in early 2025, my social feeds were full of non-puzzlers, non-gamers saying "Hey, have you seen this? It's amazing."

The Incident at Galley House is still amazing. It's graphical and voiced. It presents itself as more traditionally game-y. I honestly don't know whether that will net out as more viral or less. But if you haven't experienced this story, seriously, take a look. And if you have, take a fresh look.

(If graphics aren't your thing: the original game remains available for free.)

Dimhaven: The Lost Source

• by Zadbox Entertainment -- game site

Quern came out in 2016. A lot of great graphical adventure/puzzle games appeared around that time, but Quern was the one that most successfully revived the spirit of Myst and Riven.

(I mean, aside from Obduction. Obviously.)

So everybody wanted to see what was next for Zadbox Games. A long delay is what. But Dimhaven Enigmas was announced in 2023. It had a bit of a bumpy road, including a failed Kickstarter followed by a surprise publisher deal and a new subtitle. But Dimhaven: The Lost Source is now up and available.

It's good! It's not a rehash of Quern. That may or may not bother you.

Dimhaven is distinctly more narrative, for a start. (Quern had a story, but even while I was playing it I couldn't have told you what it was.) Dimhaven is an odd and isolated island; your uncle disappeared there; you really want to know why. Off you go. By the way, while the island is inhabited and even a bit of a tourist trap, it's only accessible by parachute.

(I said the game was more narrative. I didn't say the narrative was serious.)

Dimhaven introduces itself by saying it "doesn't hold your hand". Then it tells you to use the in-game hint system if you get stuck. Say what? Sounds like handholding to me.

Now that I've finished, I have some sense of what they mean by "no handholding". To wit: all the puzzles lean towards the obscure end of the puzzlebow. I mean the sort of puzzles where step one is figuring out what the puzzle is. Dimhaven never, ever wants to give you a direct clue.

Let me compare the recent 7th Guest remake (which I called "a perfectly good lightweight puzzle game"). One 7G puzzle is a necklace of different-colored gems. Touching a gem changes some of the gem colors. You hunt around a bit and eventually find a diagram of what colors they're supposed to be. Now you have a puzzle. It's a bit tricky, but once you have the diagram, you're basically on track.

Dimhaven doesn't have that puzzle. But if it did, it wouldn't give you the target diagram. Instead, you'd find a parable about what colors go near what other colors, or maybe a partial family tree of colored birds. Indirect clues, always. And the information would be in a different room. Hidden behind something that you didn't realize you had to move.

See what I mean? Dimhaven is not interested in the puzzle register of "Figure out how to reach the goal." It's in the register of "Construct a theory about what the goal is; try to reach it; see if that forms a solvable puzzle." If it doesn't, throw out that theory and look for a new one. Also, if you're not sure how to look behind, under, or on top of something, you'll definitely need to.

I think of this style as "Mystery Hunt puzzles", because that's the format where I first encountered it as a core tenet. Of course many adventure games have that sort of puzzle. But Dimhaven's apparent goal is to only have that sort.

By the way, when I talk about "Hunt-style puzzles", I don't necessarily mean difficult puzzles. Puzzle Spy International is a recent game which is definitely down this alley -- but on the easy side. Indirect clues, but fairly straightforward to feel through.

Dimhaven, needless to say, is on the hard side.

Inevitably, if you get stuck on a puzzle of this sort, you get wedged. Playing with the mechanism won't help you. You need to come up with the right theory. If you're not getting it, you're just not getting it. I looked at the hints two or three times. (Including once in the original demo, back when I played that.) Sometimes I said "Yeah, I should have thought of that." Sometimes I said "Pff no way." You will get stuck in different places. Don't be shy about hints.

Or play with a buddy. If you're not coming up with the right idea, it's quite likely that your buddy will see it right away. Or vice versa. Mystery Hunt is a team sport.

Besides puzzles, what have we? The story, per se, is quite well done. Good pacing, nicely integrated with your progress. You start alone on a strange island -- cue lonely-ambient music! -- but this is not a Myst-ish solitary quest. You run into an NPC, and then another; then the NPCs start to get more actively involved until they're pushing the story towards its climax.

That ending is really the only point where the narrative gets detached from the gameplay. The story primes you for a showdown: "You must do <X> before <Y> gets it!" But when you unlock that bit, it turns into an old-fashioned cut-scene and everything wraps up on its own.

To be fair, the Big Final Puzzle is a corker. And I'm not saying that they should have added time pressure! That always sucks. But the Big Final Puzzle is over and solved before the Big Final Story Climax begins. You never have a chance to feel triumphant about it.

The story doesn't have much depth behind it, either. Everything seems to run on adventure-game logic. The island of Dimhaven isn't a place; it wobbles between enigma, theme park, and mundane resort town as the plot requires. Indigenous number symbols? Seen in one puzzle, never again. Ancient artifacts? Only when relevant to the plot. What was up with the giant wall? The lighthouse? Pure scenery. I know, every game can't be Riven; but even Myst had a sense of place and history whispering from beneath its clunky journals. I'm afraid Dimhaven is a lot more like Rhem.

The visuals are nice... until I looked closely. Dimhaven doesn't hammer you with realistic detail; it takes a more stylized route. Stylized is awesome too! But Dimhaven combines low-poly models with massively pixelated textures, and the result just comes off as blurry. Inconsistently blurry, at that. A painting on the far side of the room looks fine, but breaks up into pixelated trash when you come close. The wall behind the painting looks bad at a different distance. I felt like I was constantly on the verge of eyestrain.

The worst part is clues: placards, letters, informative bits of paper. These are always too blurry to read -- until you click on them. Only in your hand does their full resolution load in. If two pieces of paper are lying on a desk, they can't both be unblurred at the same time! Drove me nuts.

What you're supposed to do is snapshot each clue with your in-game camera, and then browse the photo album. To be fair, this works fine. Use the heck out of that camera.

The best part is the lighting and the panoramic visual design. When you look out over the landscape, everything looks terrific.

To give further credit, the low-texture style means that you always know what to ignore. If it stays blurry, it's scenery. Quern had problems with focus, but the designers neatly avoided that this time out. Also, hey, Dimhaven requires a quarter the disk space that Quern did, and the min specs are barely higher than Quern's were. (Ten years ago!) The designers made a choice, is what I'm saying. It's just not to my taste.

I still recommend Dimhaven. It's a good ride and it never feels same-y. Lots of different things to do and see and solve. Plenty of good puzzles. Lots of different kinds of puzzles, but thoughtfully; no obligatory sliders or Mastermind. (Okay, one quickie static deduction scene, but that was a pleasant change of pace.) The designers are serious about puzzles, and I'm never going to complain about that.

I hope I don't have to wait another ten years to find out what's next.