For this week’s media review, we’ll be taking a look at an intriguing series of point-and-click puzzle games made by the Dutch development company Rusty Lake.
All of the Rusty Lake games are available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, as well as on Steam for PC. The two most recent games are also available on Nintendo Switch. They range from free to about $5, depending on the platform.
The games are set in a world where souls can be corrupted and return for revenge; reincarnation is possible and an immortality serum was discovered (but mistakenly given to a friendly recurring dog). A secretive group led by Mr. Owl, a man reborn as a human-animal hybrid after being sacrificed by his family to appease the lake, aims to get revenge on the family that tricked him and coax others into coming to the lake by calling it a fishing retreat for people struggling with their mental health. The lake hungers for memories, which are captured from visitors in cubes.
The franchise features three intertwining storylines, which can be distinguished by the names of their corresponding games. The first story centers on a detective named Dale Vandermeer and his past, investigating the mysterious murder of a woman named Laura Vanderboom. Vandermeer is featured in the “Cube Escape” subseries, which includes 10 different games: Seasons, The Lake, Arles, Harvey’s Box, Case 23, The Mill, Birthday, Theatre, The Cave and Paradox, the first nine of which can be downloaded together as a collection.
The second storyline follows the rest of the Vanderboom family and carries the “Rusty Lake” name. There are only three games in this subseries, being Hotel, Roots and Paradise and the bulk of the world’s lore is found within them.
The last subseries has no distinguishing naming convention and includes the games Samsara Room, the company’s first game, The Past Within, a collaborative two-player game and Underground Blossom, which is the newest game in the series having been released at the end of September. These games further reveal how Vanderboom fits into the rest of the story.
There is also a stand-alone game called The White Door, which features Robert, a side character from Vanderboom and Vandermeer’s storylines as the main character and his experiences with a treatment facility called “White Door Mental Health and Fishing,” as a juxtaposition to the alternative Rusty Lake Mental Health and Fishing. It uses a slightly different style from the other games, although still cartoony.
Each game takes place in a new location, with a variety of puzzles to explore. You use the items you get from each puzzle to uncover solutions and complete more puzzles, which reveal information and advance the story.
Although some puzzles, especially in the games released early on, can be a bit unintuitive, the puzzles are rarely too difficult, and the company posts walkthroughs of every game on their YouTube channel. There are also a host of achievements to collect in each game for an extra challenge, which are associated with secret codes between games or across their social media presence, such as an alternate reality game (ARG) they created over the summer or in their Steam announcements, for an extra layer of intractability.
Rusty Lake has been one of my favorite game series, and I’ve been having a great time exploring the lore as new games are released. Try them for yourself and see how many secrets you can uncover!
