Through Abandoned: The Underground City

I have a soft spot for games that arrived on Steam looking almost apologetically small, and Through Abandoned: The Underground City is exactly that kind of game. It started as a free flash title on Kongregate, built by one developer under the handle Krutovig, before getting an HD upgrade and a proper Steam release in 2015. That origin is important context: you are not buying a sprawling adventure here. You are buying something closer to a carefully folded paper crane, intricate for its size and complete in a way that a lot of bigger games never manage. The setup is quiet and strange in equal measure. You play as Steven Tsar, arriving at a remote hotel in 1904 following a telegram about his missing twin brother. A note leads you to a mineshaft door, and from there into a vast subterranean city whose inhabitants have simply vanished. There is no combat, no inventory juggling beyond a handful of purpose-built items. The core loop is pure point-and-click logic: find a pickaxe, crack a wall, retrieve a wheel, decode a light-bulb sequence for a door combination. The puzzles are self-contained and fair, which in this genre is worth saying out loud. One that trips people up involves a cube and two switches, and the honest answer is that everything you need is right in front of you, which is the mark of a puzzle designer who respects the player. The production is humble and the game knows it. The hand-drawn art has that slightly rough flash-game quality, but the environmental design sells the desolation well. Flooded lower chambers, a lotus well, pyramid structures, a subway that goes nowhere. The soundtrack does the heavier lifting, building a genuinely unsettling stillness that a few Steam reviewers compared to a faint Lovecraftian undercurrent. That is not overselling it. The mood is the experience, and the audio commits to it without ever becoming oppressive. For thorough explorers, there are four hidden secret symbols scattered across the city that unlock bonus lore pages after the credits, including a note from the developer himself. That kind of handcrafted gesture is rare. The honest warnings: the game runs about an hour at a comfortable pace, maybe slightly less if puzzles click quickly for you. It installs as a standalone DRM-free executable rather than launching directly through Steam, which is a small friction point worth knowing. The mechanics are not deep, and anyone expecting verb-heavy classic adventure design will find this spare. But spare and underdeveloped are different things, and this game is decidedly the former. It sits comfortably in the tradition of Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine series, an obvious comparison that Steam reviewers have made repeatedly and not without reason. The first entry in a three-game trilogy, it functions as both a complete short story and an honest invitation to continue.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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