But if you've already played everything else in their collection, it rewards by maintaining its dark lore. You can play Roots on its own, and be introduced to their world, without missing out. What Rusty Lake (the name of the developer too, allowing the creepy circle to form) does best is consistency in the strangeness of their creations. You then proceed to play through thirty-three vignettes set from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century, following the lives of three generations of a family - a family that seemingly exists to provide, well, body parts. Appears, disappears, and you know you're back in Rusty Lake, the most intelligently creepy place I know of in video games. All a vocabulary accepted and understood by decades of adventure gaming, despite its bizarre internal logic, but then one that's rather appropriately shattered when you break a glass window and there he is. Again, adventure stuff: get the bird's nest from the roof, feed the bird a worm you've found, get a jewel. You're back in control again, further to the right in this garden, with a door that appears to require three jewels to open. Plant the seed, water it, and you grow what appears to be a literal and metaphorical family tree. Get the watering can, fill it from the well, get a dog to dig a hole for a seed by asking it to bury a bone - all that sort of usually unusual stuff. So you do the point-and-click adventure thing.
And yet, on the first appearance of that fucking bird-man shadow-thing, brrrrrrrrr, it has me.
And indeed it's running in Flash, which never feels like a natural fit on a desktop. Interaction is greatly dependent on dragging the screen, which again feels natural when sliding a finger around, but very unnatural when using a cursor. Circle icons appear when you let go of a mouse click, to show the player where your finger touched - something completely unnecessary on PC. What's immediately apparent is this is very much a game intended for touch screens, and while a mouse cursor obvious manages all the same interaction, it's pretty unavoidable that it's not how they intended for it to be played. "Plant it and start your own family." Huh. So you know it's starting off in the mid 19th century, there's a dude in braces and a hat, in a garden stood next to a well, and a letter in his pocket informing him that his uncle's died, and he's left you his house and "a very special seed". These games have always been about simple interaction with complex or surreal notions - designed to be played with a single finger, but asking you to think in peculiar ways. So I enter Rusty Lake: Roots with a great sense of anticipation. Each release fits into a larger mythology that feels ominously huge and yet barely understood, awful stories of gruesome deaths and mysterious looming bird-headed figures, time-bending weirdness, and an overriding notion of cruelty that's hard to quantify.
RUSTY LAKE HOTEL WATER PUZZLE FREE
And not only did I discover the incredible Rusty Lake Hotel game, a dark and devastatingly creepy murder mystery adventure, but also their catalogue of remarkably unsettling and often brilliant free Cube Escape games. I missed its release, and found it by luck on my phone when searching for interesting escape-the-room games. Rusty Lake Hotel is a game I have meant to write about on RPS for so long.
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