Is Dimhaven - The Lost Source death by diegesis, or the next evolution in first-person puzzling?

Devin Stone, 16 December 2025

Dimhaven feels, for better and for worse, like a AAA game. I won’t spoil the opening, but it’s a banger. When your game’s first five minutes remind me of the Bioshock series, you’re doing something right. That “wow” factor continues with the visuals. The pixel-3D aesthetic combines modern lighting and effects with low-poly geometry and low-res textures. And despite its novelty, it just works. It’s a breath of crisp, coastal fresh air—exhilarating, atmospheric, and serene.

The soundtrack is also stunning. Cinematic moments are bolstered by symphonic pieces, tinkling piano and heady strings that harken back to Fable’s dark fairy tale sound, while synth pads and downtempo percussion accompany exploration and puzzling. The game’s best track, “Tourist Paradise,” puts me in the perfect mood for detective work with its lush, vibey tones, reminiscent of some of Lifeformed’s calmer offerings.

And I can’t forget the voice acting. After all, there’s a lot of it! Barks, documents read aloud, and cutscene monologues. The lead, Alex Furness, lends a lot of charm and warmth to the game, a perfect counterpoint to the chilly seaside setting. (That said, I’d appreciate a button to silence in-progress VO. Sometimes I just want to read at my own pace.)

I’m sure this all sounds wonderful, and it is. So what’s that “for worse” I mentioned? Well, it starts with the particular era of game design that Dimhaven’s audio-visual stylings echo. That era is, and I don’t say this lightly, “2010s walking simulator”. What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, Gone Home, etc. Immersive games, sure, but ones which felt more like Disneyland rides than interactive challenges. Sure, I’ll go on the Indiana Jones Adventure a dozen times in a row, but that’s not the kind of experience I want from a puzzle game.

Which means it’s up to the puzzles to quell my nervousness. And…they don’t entirely.

Puzzles in Dimhaven range vastly in form and content, from escape-room-style codes and keys, to Roottrees-esque document research, to Monkey Island absurdity. (That damned bird!) It’s a mixed bag, but at least it keeps things fresh. Unfortunately, though, outside of the delightful “VISA” puzzle, things feel a bit by the numbers. What the puzzles lack most is identity, a core mechanic to pull and tease and evolve. Zadbox’s previous game, Quern, had its magic crystals, so I assume some similar central concept eventually appears in Dimhaven. But why not in the demo? The puzzles, while individually solid, all feel kind of mechanically isolated and arbitrary.

This, I fret, is because of Dimhaven’s commitment to puzzle diegesis. We’re not dealing with panels with mazes on them. These conundrums are integrated into the world, their existence justified by the narrative. Less puzzles and more problems, coincidental obstacles, which just so happen to require the kind of lateral thinking players expect from the genre.

While I admire this dedication to worldbuilding, I struggle to think of an example of it done well in a puzzle game. There’s Blue Prince of course, but that uses the “puzzle-obsessed uncle” cheat code, excusing its twee crypticism in one fell swoop. Dimhaven has its own eccentric uncle, but as far as I’m aware, he doesn’t write brain teasers for the local newspaper. This isn’t “Escape from Puzzle Island”. It’s just an island.

Myst and its ilk mostly succeed in grounding their puzzles in their worlds, but that’s because those settings are surreal and alien. It’s a lot easier to brush off the outrageous inefficiency of a tram system or drawbridge when they were engineered by sentient clouds of blue vapor. Dimhaven’s world, meanwhile, is Earthly and familiar. Neither does Dimhaven lean on comedy, the way classic LucasArts games did, to lampshade its contrivances. It’s not a grim game, but it does take itself seriously.

Dimhaven wants, it seems, to have it both ways—interesting, satisfying puzzles organically woven into a deep, narrative-driven world. Without the cheat codes and gimmicks. Is such a thing even possible? Or do deep, mind-expanding puzzles always come at the cost of narrative coherence, and vice versa? The demo makes a decent show of it, but I’m left skeptical.

It might help if the narrative itself hooked me. You play as a woman (unreliable narrator? amnesiac?) searching for her missing uncle on a remote island, a once-lively resort destination recently abandoned under suspicious circumstances. It’s a conspiracy mystery. Other than that, it’s all pretty vague. Too vague, in my opinion, because it lacks the most critical part of any mystery story: intrigue. The game is obviously narratively driven, so I’m sure there’ll be plenty to sink one’s teeth into in the full release. I just wish the demo gave me more to excite and speculate over in the meantime.

What all this means is that it’s difficult from the demo alone to figure out what Dimhaven is really trying to do. It’s reaching hard, swinging for the fences, but toward what? All the same, I can’t help but think that if that swing does land, we might have GOTY candidate on our hands. Because while Dimhaven’s identity as puzzle game isn’t apparent from its demo, its ambition is. Fingers crossed.