Hi.
I’m Igor Krutov, the creator of Through Abandoned series. You are here because you’ve found 4/4 secrets in Through Abandoned 3. The Refuge. Which means that you’re smart and (I hope) appreciate my games. Please, welcome to my place in the web.
As a small bonus for your smartness, I want to show you which references I used creating TA3. They are some works of art, books, movies, those I like so much and they inspire me. Also I will explain some parts of the Through Abandoned universe.
The Refuge corridor.
The round doors, which leads out the Refuge are inspiring by the amazing TV film Star Gate, old Sci-Fi series. The military team discovered the net of such gates and travelled around the whole universe.
By the way, you have an access only to the one floor of the Refuge corridors with round doors. It leads to different gates in the Ordered. One floor of Refuge for one world. The gates from the corridor where you start TA3 is the Earth hub.
The language
If you press the button on the side of the gates, you’ll see the hologramm with the description of the place where this gate leads. It’s like an address in Engineers’ language. You’ve seen such symbols before. They have a sense. I developed a language of Engineers. And you can try to decrypt it, some words or at least a system.
The code on wires
The one from my favorite puzzle games is Safecracker. This idea with the code which “drawn” by wires is a tribute of respect to this game. If you like such games, you can’t pass it.
The elevator
The Refuge doesn’t exist only in a one world. It situated in different pieces of Ordered, very good hidden places: under ground of hell-type planets, inside young solar systems, near black holes. But it didn’t help and the Refuge was destroyed and people died. The Elevator is the special system that teleport you between parts of the Refuge. Each part has coordinates, but the panel was broken and you can just use “favorite floors” buttons.
The subway
You was in this very subway when you was in the Underground city. It’s the strange world where USSR and USA are the same country. You can see cyrillic words inside the subway but when you go outside through the second door in the Tower, you become in the city looks like New York. And you see English signboards. You can read the name of the station on the entrance: “Youth”. In the Subway you see Russian letters “МОЛОД**Н*Я” on the wall of the station. This is the name of the station: “МОЛОДЁЖНАЯ” (Molodyozhnaya). I can translate it as “Youth”. I must admit that the mood of abandoned subway was also inspired by the brilliant novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky “Metro 2033″ about life in the Moscow subway after a nuclear war.
But how is it possible that you can enter this very Subway from the Underground city? I don’t know. The thing is: the Subway leads to different worlds, with open teleports. Maybe it was the experiment and such portals could replace Doors. But Engineers disappeared and we will never find out it.
And the secret in the subway… Can you recognize that place? Yeah, it’s the concrete well from the Through Abandoned 1. When you played the first chapter, you can’t get here because of water, but now the well is drawn out and you can go down and activate the secret sign. I do love such jokes.
The Temple
The church hidden between worlds. Looks like there was some dark and scary cult in the Ordered. People worshipped to some powerful and angry beeings. This location is inspired by necromongers style from the movie the Chronicles of Riddick. Also it took a little bit Giger’s Aliens’ style.
The interesting question is: who was the guy in the prison under the temple who wrote down coordinates of the Core? Why he was there?
The Tower
The small hub with 6 Doors. And it looks like somebody lived here. Someone who decided who can pass and who not. There is such tower in the novel of the great modern Russian writer Sergey Lukyanenko called Rough Draft. It works as the customs between worlds. The tower in Through Abandoned doesn’t have any exit, you can watch the local world only through windows, but you can never go out.
The Way
The Way is the world parallel to our Earth but already abandoned. The place what you see is Spain. It situated on Santiago’s Way, the most popular pilgrim route in the world. People comes by feet from the different parts of Europe, through the Spain, to see remains of Saint James body in Santiago de Compostela. Once I complete this pilgrimage by bycicle and it inspired me a lot.
In the Through Abandoned universe the Way has more important, sacred meaning. It passes through the space. The hologram of the Way in space you can see in the Observatory.
Me on the Saint James Way, August 2015:
The House
This is the classical place with ghosts. Old and creepy. Try to find a couple small references in this location.
Did you like the piano puzzle? I’m a musician, guitar player and singer and it was not so easy to design a musical puzzle for non-musicians.
And who is the guy on the stained glass window? And whos diary is in the bedroom on the second floor? Hmm, maybe you see this place not the last time.
The wrecked ship
This place dedicated to my favorite game ever — Tomb Raider II. There are some levels on the wrecked ship Maria Doria in that game. The ship, which was real by the way, lies on the deep bottom of the ocean. Only sharks can reach it. And you of course, through Doors.
The gravitation anomalies is the reference to “Stalker” by Strugatsky brother. There is the anomaly called meatgrinder and when I read the book I always imagine it in such way.
The Core
When you found the way to the corridor from New York you get to the elevator shaft. There are hundreds of locations and doors here. You can imagine the size of the Refuge. But LILIT has closed all the doors and you can only come directly to her. Inside a trap.
The Core has a lot of references. People-batteries comes from Matrix, the portal machine is the small reference to Monsters Inc., the sphere room comes from X-men. And LILIT is a big reference to my favorite character from Stephen King’s books — the train Blaine the Mono from the Waste Lands. The insane AI. It’s a classic. It’s my respect for the master King, all this dialogue. Don’t judge me hard for that.
Well, the story isn’t ended. In the next parts you will know what kills everything in abandoned worlds, who built all this, meet surviviours. May be.
Through Abandoned 4. The Temple will see the light in 2018. Thank you for playing. Take care of yourselves. And comment here, I will read and answer.
And one more thing. Don’t forget to watch details. There are more interesting things hidden in the game than I told you ;)
