Through Abandoned: The Refuge

“Quite literally, around 20% of the time you complete a puzzle with a pop-up GUI, the game freezes and you have to force quit, which erases your completion of that puzzle.”

“This entry is very buggy with the game freezing several times after completing a puzzle.”

“Many reviewers complain the game freezes after completing puzzles.”

“And no puzzle game needs music, melody, or pitch riddles - this sort of thing adds nothing but a pointless obstacle.”

“But the environmental music plays a track with a similar melody the whole time, and the mechanism for programming the piano makes you pause to listen to every single note you put the cursor on, making it a painstaking process to try and get it right as you individually move the note one space at a time among dozens of possible notes.”

“In one of the sections you have to power up 4 fans and every time I solved the puzzle my screen locked up and it forced me to restart from an earlier checkpoint each time, plus other bugs like music cutting out for no reason and then returning a second later restarting the loop.”

“If you don't start playing from the first episode, you don't immediately understand the mechanics of the game and how to solve puzzles.”

“In addition, the mechanics of puzzles on windmills are incomplete.”

“The gameplay is only as long as it is because of so many asinine quests where you have to go back to the other end of the map to an area you've been to 3 times already to press one button, and not much plot really happens.”

“No option to lower the volume, no graphical settings, and the settings reset when you leave the game.”

“There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks.”

“While the artwork itself, though mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible; it might as well be a slideshow or a YouTube video.”

“The puzzle design and atmosphere deserve better than this.”

“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.”

“Nevertheless, the strange parallel-world setting gives the experience a distinctive atmosphere, while the puzzle-driven structure remains engaging when its clues and solutions come together naturally.”

“It's on par with Java/web browser based point and click games, yet is being sold for money here on Steam as a cash grab.”

“Through Abandoned: The Refuge has the greedy, cash grab price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games.”

“The creators of this game need to learn that 'obnoxious' and 'tedious' are not the same thing as 'challenging'.”

“The exploration works the same way, as in you scroll your screen left, right, up and down; however, there's even more exploration since this is by far the largest abandoned game, and it can get tedious a lot of the time. You sometimes need to do something in one location, run to a different place to get another item, and then return later. This isn't done once or twice—you might do this up to five different times across two locations, and since there are more locations now, it gets tedious pretty quickly.”

“The game concentrates more on discovery than character interaction, so players looking for lengthy conversations, cinematic scenes, or elaborate character development may find the narrative presentation somewhat sparse.”

“Fun on first playthrough but it has very little replayability.”