Hi.

I’m Igor Krutov, the creator of Through Abandoned series. You are here because you’ve found 4 out of 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 I like so much and which inspire me. Also, I will explain some parts of the Through Abandoned universe.

The Refuge corridor. 

The round doors, which lead out of the Refuge, were inspired 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 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 hologram 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

One of my favorite puzzle games is Safecracker. The idea with the code which is “drawn” by wires is a tribute of respect to this game. If you like such games, do not miss it.

The elevator

The Refuge doesn’t exist only in one world. It is situated in different pieces of Ordered, very good hidden places: under the 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 teleports 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 were in this very subway when you were 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 turn up in a city that 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 the abandoned subway was also inspired by the brilliant novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky “Metro 2033″ about the 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 opened teleports. Maybe it was the experiment and such portals could replace Doors. But Engineers disappeared and we will never find this out.

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 couldn’t get here because of the water, but now the well is dried and you can go down and activate the secret sign. I do love such things in games.

The Temple

The church is hidden between worlds. Looks like there was some dark and scary cult in the Ordered. People worshipped some powerful and angry beings. This location is inspired by necromongers’ style from the movie the Chronicles of Riddick. Also it took a little bit of Giger’s Aliens’ style.

The interesting question is: who was the guy in the prison under the temple who wrote down the coordinates of the Core? Why was he there?

The Tower

The small hub with 6 Doors. And it looks like somebody lived here. Someone who decided who could pass and who could 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 that you see is in Spain. It is situated on Saint James’ Way, the most popular pilgrim route in the world. People come on foot from different parts of Europe, through Spain, to see the remains of Saint James’ body in Santiago de Compostela. Once I completed this pilgrimage by bicycle and it inspired me a lot.

In the Through Abandoned universe the Way has a more important, sacred meaning. It passes through the space. You can see the hologram of the Way in space 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 of small references in this location.

Did you like the piano puzzle? I’m a musician, a guitar player and a 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 whose diary is in the bedroom on the second floor? Hmm, maybe it’s not the last time you see this place.

The wrecked ship

This place is 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 are the reference to “Stalker” by Strugatsky brothers. There is an anomaly called meatgrinder and when I read the book I always imagine it in such a 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 come from Matrix, the portal machine is a 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 classic. It’s my respect to 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 survivors. May be.

Through Abandoned 4. The Temple will see the light in 2019. 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 ;)

Through Abandoned is an adventure puzzle game, first person view, midcore.

December 31th 2014 I released the flash game Abandoned, which became a hit on web-portals and 2 000 000 people played it. The game won Kongregate week and month contests and got to the list of the best games of the year 2015.

After such sucsess on portals I ported the game to Steam and released it in Summer 2015. The game was renamed to Through Abandoned. It has “mostly positive” reviews.

Then I started to develop the sequel especially for Steam and mobiles.

Through Abandoned 2. The Forest was released on Steam in August 2016. If the first part was just a flash-game port with gameplay duration around 1 hour, the sequel was made as a longer and better game. 3-4 hours of gameplay, 150+ locations, 12 different worlds, good animations, ambient music, mini-games.

Through Abandoned series is a mysterious stories about the network of parallel worlds connected by portal Doors. These worlds are abandoned, and nobody knows why. You explore these worlds and try to reach your brother who discovered Abandoned and disappeared there. Also you try to solve what happened in these worlds and why people disappeared.

Through Abandoned was designed as a 7-10 part story, 3-5 hours each.

For now we released:
1. Through Abandoned (on Steam in July 2015 and iOS in December 2015)
2. Through Abandoned 2. The Forest (on Steam in August 2015)

Without any budget for marketing we sold 20000 copies of both parts together on Steam. The game already has some database of fans.

What are we looking for.

Publisher and investments.

We want to continue the game but with good publisher who can invest some money to development and do marketing.

First of all we are looking for publisher and investor of Through Abandoned 3. The Refuge (and possibly the next parts too) on Steam.

Also we are looking for publisher and investor of the port Through Abandoned 2. The Forest to mobiles.

You can contact me by the next channels:

e-mail: igor@krutovig.com
Skype: krutovig
facebook: Igor Krutov
twitter: @krutovig