Soundtrack: Quern - Undying Thoughts — a score that doesn't rush you, so it can protect your long thinking

Introduction — the moment you land on the island, nothing rushes you

Quern - Undying Thoughts is an observation-and-exploration puzzle game released by Zadbox Entertainment in 2016 (see Komugi's review; difficulty rated "Hard," with an estimated 15-hour clear time). Its core is a kind of reusable puzzle: you study a mechanism, then later use that same tool again for a completely different purpose.

The music is by Marcell Kerepesi. According to Steam's own official soundtrack DLC listing, it runs 38 tracks totaling 1 hour 54 minutes 54 seconds. What struck me in the first few minutes was how thin the sense of a track ever 'starting' felt. A sustained tone just slowly fills the air, with no hint of asking you to count a beat. Roughly 60 BPM, maybe — that's only my ear, not a measurement — slower than a walking pace.

A puzzle-specific trait — music that doesn't make you endure long thinking, but stays out of its way

Many of Quern's mechanisms don't reveal how they work just by looking at them. You pull a lever, watch a distant waterwheel start turning, then walk back. A single puzzle can have you crossing the same ground for tens of minutes.

The review site Just Adventure called the soundtrack 'immersive,' adding thickness to the player experience (justadventure.com, 2018-01-10). TheXboxHub went further, writing that 'an emotive, highly relaxing score' carries the journey across the island, and that 'the score works like a piece of meditation music' even in the trickiest moments (thexboxhub.com). Music for slow-thinking games tends to pick one of two options — make you endure silence, or distract you with a tune. Kerepesi picks the second option, but by erasing tempo itself he gets close to the effect of the first.

A hidden link with the experience — the music steps back so machinery can step forward

That same TheXboxHub review adds, separately from the music, that 'the effects are very good too, especially in regards to the machinery' (thexboxhub.com). Quern's puzzles are observational: the sound of gears meshing, a lever dropping, water rushing in — these sounds are themselves the clues. If the sustained score sat in the same frequency range, you'd lose the ability to tell them apart.

My guess is that Kerepesi's commitment to such thin, sustained tones isn't only decorative. I think space is being deliberately left open for the machinery's 'clue sounds.' The less the music asserts itself, the more clearly a device's sound stands out as an answer. It's one of the rare moments where puzzle UI and music actually shake hands.

The puzzle analogy — a path you retrace, and a chord you retrace

In Quern, a tool is never used just once. Something you pick up early returns much later carrying an entirely different meaning. Looking at the track titles, it's striking how many circle back with words like 'delayed,' 'scattered,' and 'echoed' — 'Delayed Thoughts,' 'Scattered Memories,' 'Echoes.'

I hear the same gesture in both the puzzles and the music. The sustained tones offer up the same two or three notes again and again, reshaped each time. At roughly the same pace a player revisits the same tool, the score revisits the same handful of sounds. Rather than adding something new, it spends a small vocabulary generously. To my ear, that's the musical translation of the reusable-puzzle design itself.

Tracks worth hearing

The official audio is compiled by the developer, Zadbox Entertainment, on its own YouTube channel as 'Quern - Undying Thoughts (Full Soundtrack)' — the same 38 tracks and roughly 1 hour 55 minutes as the official Steam OST.

Start with the track carrying the album's own name, 'Land of Undying Thoughts' — the sustained tone of the opening itself. Then 'Welcome to the Mechanics,' written, true to its title, for the moments you step into a device puzzle. Listening to the two back to back makes it easy to hear how Kerepesi shifts tone color between the exploration band and the machinery band. If you'd rather hear it track by track, the same 38 songs also stream on the official Bandcamp linked below.

Closing — what I'd steal

Here's what I'd steal. In moments where the clue is itself a sound effect, have the nerve to demote the music from the lead role. Keeping the score thin isn't laziness — this soundtrack shows it can be a design choice, ceding the stage to a mechanism's own sound.

One more thing. A reusable puzzle deserves reusable music. Rather than continually adding new melodies, it pays off more, over a long play session, to think about how you reshape and re-offer a small vocabulary again and again. Next time I score a slow-thinking game, I want to start by erasing the BPM.

References

・Steam: Quern - Undying Thoughts (Original Soundtrack) — official DLC page crediting composer Marcell Kerepesi

・Marcell Kerepesi's official Bandcamp — Quern: Undying Thoughts (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

・Zadbox Entertainment's official YouTube — Quern - Undying Thoughts (Full Soundtrack)

・Just Adventure review (2018-01-10, discusses the soundtrack)

・TheXboxHub review (discusses the music and machinery sound effects)