UNDYING

I went in expecting another low-budget Myst homage that would run out of ideas after an hour. Quern - Undying Thoughts, built by a four-person Hungarian studio, proved me wrong in a way I did not see coming. This is a first-person puzzle adventure set on a mysterious isolated island packed with mechanical contraptions, colored crystals, and letters from a cryptic archaeologist named Professor Maythorn who clearly had his own agenda. It sits firmly in the tradition of Myst and Riven, but it earns that comparison rather than just borrowing the aesthetic. What separates Quern from most genre peers is its commitment to systematic puzzle logic. Colored crystals found across the island have consistent, learnable properties - you are not being handed a new rulebook with every puzzle room, you are building a working model of how this world operates. Other recurring mechanics, like light refraction and weight, follow the same principle. The result is a game where solving later challenges feels genuinely earned, because you did the legwork earlier. An in-game notebook lets you screenshot puzzle states and add written notes, which sounds minor but quietly becomes essential. Plenty of players still reach for pen and paper on top of that, which says something about the depth on offer. Runtime lands somewhere between eight and fifteen hours depending on how much time you spend walking in circles (which will happen). The visual style mixes old-world stone architecture with steampunk machinery and the occasional splash of fantasy, and it holds up well for an indie from this era. The ambient soundtrack is one of the game's quieter strengths - understated, atmospheric, and genuinely calming during the moments when a machine puzzle has you completely stumped. Professor Maythorn's letters are read aloud in capable voice work, and a luminous spirit entity shows up later to complicate your understanding of who to trust. The story is thin by most standards, but it closes with a binary choice that carries more moral weight than you might expect given how little build-up it gets. Not everything lands cleanly. A handful of puzzles cross from challenging into frustrating without giving you enough of a foothold - a few reviewers noted needing walkthroughs for specific sequences, and that is a fair critique rather than a skill issue. Some backtracking across the island feels more like padding than purposeful design, and the world's color palette stays in a fairly narrow range of grey and copper for most of the runtime before opening up toward the end. Gamepad support has been flagged as awkward, so keyboard and mouse is the clear choice here. For the right player, though, none of that outweighs what Quern does well. If you grew up with Cyan's work and have been looking for a modern equivalent that respects puzzle design as a craft rather than a filler between cutscenes, this is the one. Players who bounced off The Witness for being too abstract may actually prefer Quern's more grounded, mechanical approach to logic. It is the kind of game that has people writing thirty pages of notes and reporting they felt a sense of loss when it ended. That is a specific audience, but if you are in it, you already know.

Alex · Scout Team

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