Rusty Lake Hotel Review (Faudraline)
Past is never dead. It is not even past.
Rusty Lake Hotel is the 7th game in Cube Escape series, a series of mostly freeware room escape games with elegant yet disturbing undertone. All games in the series can be either reached via Kongregate, or can be purchased as a freeware for iOS or Android. I've played the first of these games, Cube Escape: The Lake in Kongregate some years ago, and found out that the developers continued to make new games in the series, revealing new clues to the spiritual, surreal yet eerie world of the Rusty Lake, connecting pieces of a morbid story with each new game. If you are curious and would like to appreciate the world of Rusty Lake appropriately, I strongly suggest you to play other games with the intended timeline to fully enjoy the experience that is Rusty Lake. Most of these games present you 15-20 minutes of gameplay with more anecdotes to speculate about the nature of the given world and its setting.
In this short yet morbid puzzle game, we take the role of a butler that serves in the Rusty Lake Hotel, a mysterious establishment settled upon a small island in the middle of the infamous Rusty Lake. The world of Rusty Lake is inhabited by odd andromorphic animals, including our hotel staff: all knowing and charismatic hotel manager Mr. Owl, silent attendant and receptionist Mr. Crow, bell boy Mr. Bat and chef extraordinaire Mr. Toad. In a fateful evening, our guests arrive: Mr. Deer, Mr. Boar, Miss Pheasant, Mr. Rabbit and Mrs. Pigeon. They will be staying with us for a short while, and it is our duty to attend their needs and arrange an excellent dinner party for our guests each night. Sounds simple enough, yet with each passing night our encounters grow a bit more disturbing, ending with a peculiar story revelation somewhat meaningful only if you've played previous games.
Here comes mild or speculative spoilers, so feel free to skip this paragraph if need be. As a personal interpretation, the Cube Escape series, aside from highly disturbing point and click adventures, serve as symbolic happenstances concerning memory, deed and afterlife. Various figures with their own vices - like vanity, gluttony, greed etc. are presented as andromorphic animals in this surreal habitat where they'll be lured with their own vices as bait and used to satisfy a supernatural demand by gruesome means. The hotel and its environment serves as a Limbo-like setting for their memories to be extracted and collected. It was mentioned in previous games that the lake feeds on memories and whence memories are extracted from guests, what is left would be unsettling creatures of nightmares - or rather our antagonists for the following games. Yet again, this is just a personal interpretation, so I highly suggest for you to try other games to present your own. It all is quite Twin Peaks-ish with a touch of John Keddie.
The game mostly consists of a basic point & click adventure, with some neatly arranged puzzles and a room escape concept for each night. If you manage to complete the game, you will be given a code to use in following Cube Escape games, revealing more information about the nature of this symbolic setting. This is a gruesome and short experience for your own contemplation considering all events and figures presented are highly symbolic and more so supernatural. It's more like surrealist art; completely open to interpretation and even to introspection. Enjoy!
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