Through Abandoned: The Forest

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they were made in a dim room by one person who really meant it, and Through Abandoned: The Forest fits that description precisely. This is the second entry in Igor Krutov's series, picking up immediately where the first chapter left off as you chase your missing twin brother deeper into a network of parallel worlds. The Forest is the biome this time, and it carries a genuinely unsettling quietness, the kind that comes from hand-drawn screens and ambient music rather than any jump-scare mechanics. Players describe it as sitting somewhere between suspense and mystery, not a horror game, but one that sustains a real sense of dread through atmosphere alone. The structure is classic point-and-click, rooted deeply in the Flash-era adventure tradition. You scroll through a grid of static screens, gather items, bring them to interactive spots, and unlock doors that open into smaller sub-dimensions hiding crucial puzzle pieces. Key-gathering is central: collect the right objects, deduce how they combine, and gates open. The logic is sometimes clean and satisfying, sometimes opaque enough that you will absolutely spend twenty minutes staring at a wall wondering what the game is asking of you. There is no hint system. None. That absence is either a feature or a dealbreaker depending on your tolerance for the old-school contract of deduction-by-exclusion. Community walkthroughs exist and are well-documented, which softens the sting considerably. The visuals have a cartoonish, Flash-adjacent quality that will not win anyone over on technical grounds. Screens are reused in places, and the UI strips most guidance down to bare minimalism. But that aesthetic is not accidental, it suits the tone of a world that people have quietly abandoned. The soundtrack, composed by Alexander Ahura, is the real carrier of mood here, ambient and chic in ways that punch well above the game's budget. If you let it, the soundscape does a lot of the narrative heavy lifting that the sparse on-screen text cannot. Runtime is short. A first playthrough lands somewhere around two hours depending on how long you wrestle with the trickier puzzles, and a replay with foreknowledge can be done in minutes. There is one missable achievement worth tracking if you care about completionism, but the experience is designed as a single meaningful passage rather than a game you return to repeatedly. The first chapter in the series functions almost like a prologue; this one is where the story actually starts to take shape, though it does not resolve cleanly and leaves threads dangling for the third entry, The Refuge. This is a game for people who grew up treating adventure game walkthroughs as a last resort rather than a first tool, who appreciate hand-crafted atmosphere over production value, and who do not need sixty hours to feel like their time was respected. It has real craft in it. The puzzles are mostly clever rather than cruel, the world has genuine texture despite its simplicity, and there is something honest about a game this small that knows exactly what it wants to be. Go in expecting a short, quiet, occasionally maddening little mystery and it delivers.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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