Rusty Lake Paradise 2018: An Unforgettable Puzzle Experience

At this moment, Rusty Lake is its own world, consisting of nine Flash games and three retail games. Each game serves as a window into the twisted machinations of the lake and its inhabitants, and Paradise is no exception. This entry, like Rusty Lake Roots before it, delves into the past of one of the setting’s important characters, answering a few questions but leaving lots more unanswered. For those unfamiliar with the lake’s rituals, the bizarre and macabre story won’t make much sense, but for those who are, it’s a fun outing with a few twists.

In the wake of his mother’s death, Jakob Eilander has been summoned back to his Paradise Island home. The 10 Biblical plagues of Egypt have struck the island, and it is up to Jakob to see his family through this tragedy. As a specific auspicious occasion approaches, they’ll be assisting him in bizarre and backward ways, giving cryptic knowledge and sacrifices. With each pandemic, Jakob will discover more about his mother’s destiny, his family’s responsibilities, and what the gloomy future has for him.

We’re not sure what you’re doing here if you’ve never played a Cube Escape or Rusty Lake game, but they’re frightening puzzlers focusing on escaping particular chambers or assisting with dreadful prophecies. Paradise has a lot more in common with Roots than the others because the main task is to defeat the plague at any given time. Finding a black cube is always required, however, the manner of obtaining one varies depending on the illness. You may be required to perform a bone and blood ceremony, guide a monster to its food or give a burger to your uncle in order for him to poop out a magic cube.

Rusty Lake has a distinct approach to horror, strong on both the macabre and the bizarre, that can appear at odds with itself at times. The fog that covers a gigantic beast and a metamorphosis sequence that leaves a terrifying presence on the island are two examples of dramatic atmospheres in Paradise. Others, such as rummaging through dung for a cube, playing animal charades with your strange family, or collecting body secretions from your grandmother, come to mind. Paradise is a mixed bag, never truly frightening and frequently ludicrous, but the overall result is Lynchian weirdness, shown by how blase and accepting your family is when you have to take a member’s heart and replace it with clockwork gear.

Rusty Lake Paradise is a great point-and-click adventure built on years of development from a mechanical aspect. The series has moved past the old pitfalls of having to put a specific item in a random place to combine or randomly clicking over and over to get different results, and interaction is simply clicking on things to use, pick up, or apply, and the series has moved past the old pitfalls of having to put a specific item in a random place to combine or randomly clicking over and over to get different results. The fact that you have the entire island to explore, with some hidden sections coming up later in the game, is a further refining of the formula. It’s a wonderful contrast from the regular Rusty Lake games’ limited scale, and it aids in providing hints to your objectives as to what happens on the island between plagues. Because you have to scour the island ten times after resolving a few afflictions, the island itself begins to feel small, although we give them credit for a couple of really terrifying passages late in the game.

You should probably know by now whether or not the Rusty Lake games are for you, and if they are, there’s no reason to skip Paradise. If you’re still on the fence, we’re not sure Paradise will persuade you, but it is one of the best games in the series. It’s a more compact package than most, building to something palpable and unavoidable, instilling just the proper amount of dread. It arrives via the grotesque and ludicrous, as in previous games in the series, but there’s no denying the horrors conjured up when it’s most needed. Rusty Lake Paradise is a wonderful adventure game, colored primarily by its tone and reliance on its series, but if it strikes the right notes with you, those may be positives that lead you further into the mystery.

Click here to check out our last review on Rusty Lake: Roots.