The Rusty Lake series has now been running for an impressive 11 years. Beginning as Cube Escape, a series of free, short Flash puzzle-based escape room games (before they were really called that), it then quickly embellished itself to include longer, more story-driven entries. There are now ten Cube Escape games and nine mainline games in its ever-growing world of Lynchian weirdness. Servant of the Lake is a return to the style of entries that would usually be prefixed with the Rusty Lake moniker, like Rusty Lake Hotel and Rusty Lake Roots, another creepy exploration of a generation of the Lake’s Vanderboom family. Which, I’m perhaps not-so-subtly indicating, makes this perhaps a little too familiar.
Taken purely in isolation, Servant of the Lake would be a splendid, peculiar puzzle adventure, packed with unsettling scenes and ethereal appearances, in which you play as a servant hired to work for the Vanderboom family over a three-day weekend. Three siblings are meeting up for their annual gathering, but each has nefarious motives for their attendance that don’t bode well for the other two. You’re supposed to try to keep everyone happy, and because it’s Rusty Lake, also watch as they seem to turn into crows or weird scratchy-eyed entities, all while feeding parrots, finding codes, and solving visual puzzles.
Servant of the Lake, however, is not isolated, but rather the 20-somethingth entry in an increasingly complicated and delightfully macabre tale that has recently incorporated mixed-media experiments like Paradox (both game and film), co-op puzzling in The Past Within, the fourth-wall-breaking Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, and whatever on earth the wonderful The White Door was. And played in this context, this feels like very well-covered territory.
Ordinarily I’d likely overlook this because of how much I enjoy spending time in the Rusty Lake universe. Beginning as a blatant Lynch rip-off (the original story was based on never solving the murder of a young woman called Laura, with a cast of peculiar, uncanny characters and an obsession with owls), it has delved into its own unique directions and developed a lore of its own that feels at once consistent and yet completely intangible. There are cubes, most often black or white but sometimes not. We repeatedly meet Mr. Crow, Mr. Owl, a whole range of seemingly sentient hands, and the shadowy horror of Corrupted Souls. Also for some reason Vincent Van Gogh appears to play a recurring role, alongside an apparently immortal (or at least incapable of staying dead) parrot called Harvey, whose black eggs contain all manners of wrongness.
The way the series has historically mixed its ongoing lore with new historical periods and the family members of the Vandermeers, Eilanders and Vanderbooms typically makes for fascinating experiences, combined with solid puzzles and outright strangeness. So yes, bring it all on. Which is making me wonder why Servant of the Lake hasn’t gripped me in the same way.
And then I realize it’s pretty simple: it’s just not all that gripping.
I like the antagonistic relationship between the siblings, and I especially like the way the family’s maid (your immediate boss) is clearly living in barely-concealed verge-of-breakdown terror. But in the end, there’s nothing in Servant of the Lake that doesn’t feel like a remnant of one of the previous entries. Most especially Rusty Lake Hotel, right down to similarly including a sequence in which you must correctly dish out meals to the siblings. At the same time, it doesn’t seem to introduce anything new of its own. Mr. Crow obviously shows up, but cubes just seem to be background details; Corrupted Souls do their job but feel over-used, and there’s no big hook that makes this feel unique.
2023’s Underground Blossom was a brilliant exploration of Laura’s life, viewed over multiple years, but somehow all playing out in a single subway station. 2022’s The Past Within required two people to play, seeing the same locations at different times and working together to solve puzzles. 2020’s The White Room was a significant break from the thematic style of the Rusty Lake universe while still feeling like it added huge details through a far more personal story. And yes, this means we go back as far as 2018 before we get to the last “regular” game, Rusty Lake Paradise, so perhaps many will be delighted by this more straightforward entry, given it’s been eight years. Perhaps it’ll feel nostalgic. Maybe I broke that by replaying every game in the Rusty Lake franchise, in order, earlier this year?
I still wish it had something more. Some big new twist on the arc, or a new, key bit of information that lets us speculate further over the series’ ongoing mysteries. But I also wish it were a meatier game, with a more compelling narrative.
It’s interesting to write all this, to focus so much on what the game isn’t. It does the Rusty Lake thing just as you’d expect it to, and there are a couple of good scares in there. But it also has you inspect the same three portraits for at least three separate puzzles, there’s somehow another sequence about getting a character ready in the morning, and there’s a scene with a character’s nipples on display and you can’t even tweak them, let alone climb inside. (What a sentence for those not familiar with the games.) Perhaps that’s what it is: it feels less than. It’s a backward step, albeit one with the usual excellent art and some fantastic voice acting. And I didn’t want a backward step: I wanted to see these extraordinarily inventive and deeply clever Dutch developers take me somewhere new.
If you’ve played all the other Rusty Lake games, then yes, of course you’ll play this too, and it’ll deliver a Rusty Lake experience. But if you’re new to the world, please, get yourself the remastered (freed from Flash) Cube Escape Collection which is currently half off and only $2.50 for nine short games. Or better yet, pick up everything and play them through in order, which extraordinarily, you can do for $19, and that includes Servant of the Lake!
