Rusty Lake
I’ve recently been replaying the entire Rusty Lake franchise from the start, beginning with the incredible Cube Escape series, and then the larger PC/mobile adventure games, Rusty Lakes Hotel, Roots, and Paradise. I’m right near the end of Paradise right now, looking forward to returning to The White Door, Samsara Room, The Past Within, and Underground Blossom. And yet, despite this incredible run of ten years of fantastic, creepy, near-inexplicable adventure games, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it.
Unashamedly inspired by David Lynch (occasionally going a bit too far, literally quoting from Twin Peaks), these games all focus on the titular lake, and the few buildings that are built on its banks and islands. The games follow multiple generations of a couple of families, each haunted by the same creatures—Mr. Owl and Mr. Crow—who seek to extract memories from the dead, so they can be returned to the lake. Each was originally the patriarch of one of the families, and seemingly responsible for the “corrupted souls” that feature in every game.
I’m writing all that with an unearned confidence, given it’s so incredibly hard to entirely follow—trying to maintain the Rusty Lake narrative is like grabbing at smoke. What we know for sure is not to trust the owls, and that there will be blood.
The Cube Escape games are essentially escape room games, elevated by their surrealism and faintly interconnected storyline. The cubes are a vital part of every game in the series, the black cubes made from painful memories, the white from positive. The very rare blue cubes can travel through time, while the golden cubes are a combination of all three, and despite appearing in three of the games so far, have an unknown purpose. These all appear in the full-length games too, which are more traditional PnC adventures, albeit ones where you might not entirely know who it is you’re playing, when and where you are, and why that man with the stag skull for a head is suddenly staring at you through that window.
