It’s a great stand-alone game and a lovely place to begin. Personally, I started with Rusty Lake: Roots as my first game in the series.
Rusty Lake’s wonderful series was the first that came to mind! ♥
So, I wanted to recommend some FREE (and/or affordable) horror-related games, even if we couldn’t create them ourselves. While we’ve been providing a wide variety of FREE STUFF to help y’all get through the months-long pandemic lockdown, no one in our core team has the know-how to create games. I just genuinely enjoy them and most of them are FREE to play. This isn’t a sponsored post in any way (I’m actually kinda nervous about if/when the Rusty Lake peeps will see this!) and won’t get any sort of a kickback if you grab these games. The first page of my phone’s GAMES folder is entirely (except for the two on the bottom-right) comprised of Rusty Lake games! These games will have you feeling amused-yet-uneasy, filled with dread while simultaneously delighted, challenged enough to never be bored yet not overly stressed (you can poke around and solve puzzles at your own pace), and you’ll likely still be thinking about these little games long after you’ve finished playing them. If you ever watched Twin Peaks and thought “I wish I could interact with/play with this show instead of just watching it!”… here ya go! (Note: Rusty Lake’s games have the “feeling” of Twin Peaks, but feature their own unique universe, characters, and plots). Robin and Maarten, Rusty Lake’s founders/developers, were heavily influenced by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. While not billed as “horror” games, everything put out by Rusty Lake thus far has had a quirky-yet-creepy vibe.
The four premium games vary in price depending on sales and whatnot, but are usually between $1.99-3.99 USD.
Plus a spin-off game, The White Door, put out via their alternate brand, Second Maze Studios. Rusty Lake also has three premium (but still highly affordable) point-and-click “adventure” games - Roots, Hotel, and Paradise. (Excluding Chapter 2 of Cube Escape: Paradox, the paid DLC).
You CAN, however, help virtual characters escape various rooms in Rusty Lake’s “Cube Escape” games!Īll of the “Cube Escape” games are available for FREE for Android, iOS, and Steam. But, no matter how bored you feel, please obey the pandemic lockdown rules (for your own safety and the good of us all). There are more than a few filler puzzles here, which is a shame in a game that’s only three or four hours long.Does sheltering-in-place have you climbing up the walls? A lot of folks wish they could “escape” their rooms these days. My only complaint is the puzzles Paradise pads out the action with. The moments where you spot a veiled reference, where a mask or a throwaway line or a puzzle callback suddenly speaks volumes about a character-those moments are special because you realize there is an internal consistency underlying the gore and the absurdist humor. Surface level weirdness disguises a strict internal logic, a purposefulness that’s apparent whether one, three, or a dozen games in. Or you can drill deep on the lore, turn it over in your mind, try to draw those connections. Your brother turns into a fly and you think “Wow, that’s weird/gross/creepy” and move on. It’s a unique tone piece, and like most tone pieces it’s often helpful to sit back and let it wash over you, to take in the imagery with an open mind. That’s I guess what makes Rusty Lake stand out. If anything, I feel less certain what’s going on after every new iteration. If the “real puzzle” of Rusty Lake is figuring out that overarching narrative, I’m still a long ways off from a solution. Not that any of it makes sense, or at least not to me. But Paradise is probably the most overtly Biblical, an interesting addition when filtered through Rusty Lake’s surreal horror tendencies. Roots had references to Cain and Abel, for instance. This isn’t the first Rusty Lake game to dabble in Biblical allegory. It’s a grandiose undertaking for what started as a simple escape room series. These ten plagues serve as Paradise’s framework, each the same sort of puzzle-laden vignette that made up Hotel and Roots. Paradise is probably unpleasant at the best of times but the name is doubly ironic at the moment, as in the wake of Jakob’s mother’s death the island has been beset by the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt-frogs, flies, diseased livestock, and so on. “Home” in this case is the titular Paradise, a small and barely habitable island in the middle of a lake. The setup this time: Jakob Eilander, eldest son, returns home after his mother’s death.