Rusty Lake is back with another deliciously macabre adventure, and if you've slept on the overlooked series you're missing out
If you’ve been reading Eurogamer for any length of time there’s a good chance you’ve already seen me harp on about the shamefully overlooked Rusty Lake series. It’s a wonderfully macabre thing; strange, haunting, often unexpectedly disturbing, but also brilliantly accessible, and cheap as chips too. I love it, and will never stop telling people about it in a bid to share that love, so here I am again now that new game Servant of the Lake has been revealed.
Before we get onto the new stuff, though, a bit of background might be in order, seeing as Rusty Lake is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and has one hell of a back catalogue to enjoy. Not including Servant of the Lake, the series now consists of 18 games and a short film; some are fully fledged premium offerings – usually lasting a couple of hours and most often released under the Rusty Lake label – while the rest, known as Cube Escape, are shorter (and somewhat less polished) free-to-play companion pieces.
By and large, though, all follow the same basic formula, melding casual point-and-click puzzling with room-escape-style conundrums. And with a few notable exceptions, the key word is “casual”; these are brilliantly accessible adventures, most memorable for their irresistibly macabre ambience, and the fascinating history of the mysterious Vanderboom family at their centre, rather than any radical design convolutions.
Early games are pretty shameless in their debt to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal TV series Twin Peaks (right down to a murder victim called Laura and a detective called Dale), but it doesn’t take long for developer Rusty Lake to establish its own deeply weird, and decidedly idiosyncratic lore. And with each entry usually approaching the story from a radically different direction – one, for instance, plays out during a horrifically doomed birthday party, and another takes place entirely from within a cardboard box – it all adds up to a wonderfully sinister (and narratively intertwined) saga of standalone adventures.
