Through Abandoned: The Refuge

𝑬𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒂𝒏

Barely playable with the sheer amount of bugs and softlocks in it. Every time you complete a puzzle you have to pray that the game won't either crash/freeze or softlock you in the puzzle screen. It usually does those two, though, which means you have to restart the game and do the puzzle again. The achievements are barely functional, they only show up after you close the game. Luckily, that'll be happening a lot with the aforementioned bugs. If you pick up an extremely difficult to avoid item at the start before exploring past it, it will completely lock you out of fully completing the game. You have to reset your whole save and play through it again, doing the same buggy puzzles. The dialogue is fine for the most part but some lines just don't make sense at all. I think it's a translation issue. There's also only three settings: Music 100% volume or music off, SFX 100% volume or SFX off, and language. No option to lower the volume, no graphical settings, and the settings reset when you leave the game. (So, pretty much every single time you do a puzzle) It's really just not worth the trouble, even at $0.99.

"Charming point-and-click, but the freezing makes it a chore to finish" Third entry in the Through Abandoned series — classic point-and-click, hand-drawn atmosphere, decent puzzles as you explore a mysterious place stuck between worlds. The art and mystery/sci-fi setup are genuinely appealing. Can't recommend without a serious warning though: nearly every mini-game froze on completion, and each time meant closing and relaunching the entire game to continue — not just restarting that section. This happened consistently enough that it turned a relaxed hour of point-and-click into a frustrating stop-and-restart loop. Finished it 100% (all 7 achievements) in about an hour, but a good chunk of that was closing and reopening the game rather than actually playing. The puzzle design and atmosphere deserve better than this. Bottom line: the game underneath the bugs is fine, but constant freezing requiring a full relaunch is a real problem, not a minor annoyance. Hard to recommend until this gets patched.

I really loved this series and the story/puzzles were interesting, but the game is too buggy to play. every time i solved a puzzle, the screen would freeze. I'd have to leave the game and re enter and re solve the puzzle. A couple of the puzzles had answers so nonsense that even when I looked up a solution, I couldn't figure it out. The ending was very fun and clever though, so maybe play the game on a platform other than steam?

Fun but hard and pricey

This game has a cool story. But its buggy. Be prepared to restart it many times. It does save your progress. so that's good. The cursor has a tendency to disappear if you move it out from the center after solving a puzzle (I think), so make sure you keep it close to the puzzle. I recommend the game, but not for the easily frustrated. And I used a walkthrough a few times, so that helped.