In May of last year, developer Pine Studio released a game called Faraway: Puzzle Escape (Free) to the App Store. It was a first-person puzzle adventure game that was heavily inspired by the classic Myst and it had you exploring ancient Mayan ruins as you solved various types of puzzles and discovered loads of secrets. What I loved most about Faraway when I wrote about it back then was its super clean aesthetic and its wonderful touchscreen controls, which made moving around and poking and prodding at the environment a lot of fun. The following November the studio released the sequel Faraway 2: Jungle Escape (Free) which brought a similar sort of adventure to jungle environments, and then this past May just prior to the one year anniversary of the first game’s release they launched Faraway 3: Arctic Escape (Free) which took the series to a snowy world. That last entry was supposed to be the end for the series, but this week Pine Studio has launched a fourth game in the series, Faraway 4: Ancient Escape (Free).

As you can see this latest Faraway game takes us to what appears to be ancient Greek or Roman influenced worlds, and features a similar clean visual design and similar types of puzzles to the previous games. I was not expecting the series to continue to today’s release of Faraway 4 has been an incredibly pleasant surprise. Perhaps what is best of all about the entire Faraway series is that they use an extremely friendly pay model. All the games are free to download and play up to a certain point, typically about halfway through the game. By that point you should definitely know if it’s a game you want to continue with, so you’re given the option of purchasing the full game either in packs of chapters or the whole thing at once in a bundle that’s a little bit cheaper. It basically means there’s no excuse for not checking out the Faraway games including this new one, so if you’ve slept on this series up to this point now is a good time to rectify that.